[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

I would argue that systems research has been incredibly relevant. First consider programming languages. Even though languages such as Java, C++, C# are all widely used, they are much different languages than they were in the early 2000’s. You can see the influences of academic research especially from the functional languages (monads) on these languages. Also, Rust is an exciting new language that is enabled by the systems software research of the past.

If you look at networking, recently, there has been the move towards new protocols (quic) that was the result of systems research looking at the deficiencies of tcp. Another area is consensus algorithms. We now have large scale real life deployments of consensus algorithms, for example Spanner and etcd.

The late 90’s and early 2000’s were a weird time where the hardware was improving so fast and taking software along for a free ride that a lot of software was good enough. Now, as we bump more into the end of Moore’s Law, we will be seeing more research and real life usage of multicore and heterogenous computing and libraries and languages and operating systems that try to make that easier.

[lallysingh]

While he mentions languages & networking up top, he's not really complaining about it. Those have and continue to advance nicely. OSs have definitely gone into small-increment-improvement mode

[dgellow]

> The late 90’s and early 2000’s were a weird time where the hardware was improving so fast and taking software along for a free ride that a lot of software was good enough.

Would you say that wasn’t the case during the past 20 years (2000-2019)? Or do you consider all that period to be “early 2000’s”?

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

I think Herb Sutter's 2005 article "The Free Lunch Is Over" was a signal that this was changing.

http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm