[dist1ll]

That's definitely a trend we're moving towards for extremely high-performance software. General-purpose operating systems often don't sit at the right level of abstraction, and lack the flexibility for certain demanding workloads. Kernel-bypass networking is the gold standard for low-latency, high throughput networking. Serverless platforms often rely on userspace schedulers and userspace page fault handlers.

That's one of the reasons unikernels seem to be a promising way forward. It opens up a bunch of opportunities, including language-based safety, opportunities for compile-time optimizations, and just seems to mirror more closely how we wish to run & deploy modern applications (declarative, immutable and ideally with a bare minimum of dependencies).