[yingw787]

Commercial research is decently different from academic research, which is what I think Rob may be referring to.

Commercial research needs to keep in mind the existing legacy systems used by the sponsor. Innovations are more evolutionary instead of revolutionary as the field matures. They may be more tailored to observable pain points of the research sponsor. They may not be widely shared if they yield results providing a competitive advantage. While it may not demand immediate returns, commercial research does have an axe to grind. All of this hampers advancement in the field of computer science in general.

I also don't know if there's any kind of commercial research on the scale of XEROX PARC or Bell Labs. I can't think of any off the top of my head. Microsoft and Google do some pretty neat research, but I don't think they've shipped anything quite on a similar scale.

There's really no organization hiring the best talent to work on the kind of black swan events commercial research may miss. For example, I think it'd be cool to have a microcode-based OS; I've heard it would help with keeping operating systems secure. But who would fund it, and who would work on it? Right now it doesn't look like anybody would, and that might be what Rob is concerned about.

[geofft]

Some specific innovations off the top of my head that are pretty firmly outside traditional academic research, and seem more revolutionary than evolutionary:

- Linux's read-copy-update synchronization mechanism. It has been described in papers, but you're better off following mailing list posts or LWN writeups.

- Rust's borrow checker and lifetime system. It's built on existing well-known ideas (e.g. affine types) and there's since been some academic work on formalizing it, but the specific system Rust uses has no direct precedent, is pretty novel, and was developed outside academia. (Note that Rust came out of Mozilla Research, which is far, far smaller than Bell Labs but also an organization that intentionally works on revolutionary and not evolutionary improvements.)

- libdill and Trio's structured concurrency, a solid theoretical framework for handling async/await-shaped problems without turning your execution into concurrent spaghetti. The techniques are not unprecedented, but https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-g... is a better framing of it.