[m132]

> They did not do a lot of mistakes in the 25+ years

If my memory serves, .NET and WinFS were the two major forces that sunk Longhorn, and both have been given their walking papers after the reset [1].

.NET and C# have grown to be mature and well-engineered projects, but the road there was certainly not without bumps. It's just that a lot of the bad parts haven't spilled outside of Microsoft, thankfully.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2005/05/26/dotnet_longhorn/

[Sammi]

Are we mixing the language and the runtime here? C# the language seems weirdly free of weirdness and footguns.

[jayd16]

Not only that, they went as deep as mixing in project issues with language design. A massive rewrite mixed with massive feature changes is always a tricky thing no matter the language.

[moron4hire]

.NET was already a going concern before Longhorn even started. What sank Longhorn was the fact that writing an OS from scratch is hard and maintaining compatibility with existing OSes in the process is even harder, especially when you're adopting a completely new architecture. Longhorn would have been a microkernel running 100% on the .NET runtime, mainline Windows is a monolithic kernel written in C++. I don't know how it would have ever worked, whether .NET was "perfect" or not.

[senderista]

No, Longhorn was neither a microkernel nor was the kernel rewritten in .NET.

Source: I was there.

[oaiey]

I think he confuses longhorn with Singularity research project.

[pjmlp]

See Android, or Meadows for alternative reality.

[moron4hire]

Android still runs on a monolithic kernel written in a memory-unsafe language. I'm finding it suprisingly difficult to find information on Meadow, other than it runs .NET DLLs as user-space applications, but nothing about the structure of the kernel.

Longhorn was going to be more than that. Microsoft did have Singularity/Midori projects, started around the middle of Longhorn/Vista, and continued much longer after Vista released to build out the managed microkernel concept. It's been about a decade since they've put any work into it, though.

[pjmlp]

Microsoft wasn't even able to deliver that, which was my whole point.

Joe Duffy mentions on a talk, that even with Midori running production workloads, Windows team could not be changed their mind.

Meadow uses a C++ based microkernel, the whole userspace is based on .NET, by the way.

[oaiey]

The article is presenting some stuff mixed up. Had nothing to do with the language or the framework. WinFS was a database product. Over engineered and abstract.

.NET and C# were researched a lot for operating system usage (Midori, Singularity) but that was after Longhorn.

The operating system group UI toolkits was a further problem and they pivoted there dozen of times in the years. Particular for a C++ based os group.

But the death of longhorn was ultimately about the security restart of Bill Gates

[pjmlp]

Nope, what sunk Longhorn was politics.

Windows team is a C++ kingdom, and those devs will not adopt .NET even at gun point.

They redid Longhorn with COM and called it WinRT, irony of ironies, WinRT applications run slower than .NET with COM reference counting all over the place.

Google has showed those folks what happens when everyone plays on the same team, and now it owns the mobile phone market, a managed userspace with 70% world market.