Not your dad's Windows

Things could get interesting for Mac and Linux users in the next few years if Midori is any indication. It looks like Microsoft may actually be quite serious about building a whole new operating system from scratch to compete with its more nimble competitors, and Midori is an impressive start in that direction. The most interesting part of all is that the vast majority of the operating system is actually written in C#, not a low-level language like C or C++.

If Microsoft is able to get old Windows software to run in an emulator on top of Midori, it will be a very competitive product. Then, Microsoft can encourage developers to switch entirely to .NET for their development and do all of their day-to-day tasks in C# or VB.NET on top of a high performance virtual machine built deep into the guts of their operating system, probably running as part of the kernel.

Managed code really is the wave of the future. There is very, very little that has to be done in native code today, that cannot be done in a combination of managed code like .NET or Java and the occassional forray into native code via C libraries. We're fast approaching the point in hardware where the benefits will vastly outweigh the costs of relying that heavily on virtual machines.