I had been meaning to comment on
@Jonathan_Blow’s “Why can’t we even conceive of writing a new OS today” post. Coincidentally, I just got an email that opened with: ——————————————— Hey John, 2 years ago I pitched you LIBBA - a dedicated OS for smart glasses. You were sceptical, your main concern was that a custom OS rarely justifies itself: cost, shelf life, and developer burden outweigh the benefits. You were right. ——————————————— I deeply love the ideals of clear, efficient programs that do their job without baggage, and I have always been very sympathetic to efforts like Oberon, Plan 9, and even TempleOS. But building a new operating system today doesn’t make any product sense. Meta spent a lot of resources working on a fully custom XROS, over my rather strenuous objections. They had top tier engineering talent, tons of support, and they were producing high quality code and docs. It was a best case scenario from a “new OS” perspective, and, as one of the engineers put it, “If we can’t do it, who could?” I wish I could drop (so many of) my old internal posts publicly, since I don’t really have the incentive to relitigate the arguments today – they were carefully considered and prescient. They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad, but I expect many of them would acknowledge in hindsight that the Meta products would not be in a better place today if the new OS effort had been rammed into them. I can only really see a new general purpose OS arriving due to essentially sacrificing a highly successful product’s optimality to the goal of birthing the new OS, and I wouldn’t do that myself as a stakeholder. To make something really different, and not get drawn into the gravity well of existing solutions, you practically need an isolated monastic order of computer engineers. Which was sort of Plan 9…