Re:Microsoft: An Open Source Windows Is 'Definitely Possible'
by Jweb_Guru on Friday April 03, 2015 @08:40PM
(#9319408)
Microsoft Research has numerous languages that provide many, many more guarantees than Rust. If Microsoft were to design a completely new kernel, I'd be fairly disappointed if they didn't do it in something Z3 Boogie based like Dafny.
Re:Microsoft: An Open Source Windows Is 'Definitely Possible'
by cwyers on Friday April 03, 2015 @08:58AM
(#9315576)
Microsoft Research is still building Midori:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_%28operating_system%29
There was an article here a few months ago about 5 (?) new innovative operating systems that have security in mind. One was MirageOS and there was another one I liked - something about resource starvation - but I can't remember the name now.
There's also the Ethos OS, that comes with the "encrypted by default" MinimaLT networking stack, and so on.
I'd be much more excited about a "new" Windows that's open source and is truly built for the 21st century with (cyber-) security in mind, than just dumping the old Windows onto the Linux kernel (and I bet they won't even bother to implement grsec in that, if they do it, because it's yet another patched-up solution for an unsecure kernel, that breaks a lot of stuff).
It would also be lovely if this new kernel was built with Rust or some other type-safe language.