[wtetzner]

> that seems backwards to me

I'm not sure I completely understand which part you find backwards. Do you mean merging language runtimes and the OS is a bad idea, or that you think merging them would lead to more innovation?

I can see an argument for both (in terms of innovation), but being able to run only one language environment on a computer at a given time would make it much harder and heavy weight to use new languages. Or at the very least, new language runtimes.

[convolvatron]

I certainly see that the OS interface is limit to language innovation in that it assumes a lot the things I mentioned, and these tend to get shoehorned in and turn into a series layer violations to poke through all the needed flags and controls.

we definitely gain a lot of acceleration from having a common substrate, but it acts a constraint.

virtual machines are really a good out, whether that's a hardware isolation layer, or just a software abstraction. I think the view that the hypervisors present (simple virtio style devices) are maybe a better canonical OS interface than the sprawling syscall+library model.

but sure, unless I wanted to develop a language and runtime that _really_ looked different, I would try to paper over posix to the degree possible.