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Unikernels follow an old approach from high level languages in the 60, 70 and early 80's, with their full stack approach.

Think Burroughs, Lisp Machines, Mesa/Cedar, Lillith, Spin OS, Oberon,...

Basically the language runtime is the OS and access to lower layers is done via the type system.

> An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one.

Yep.

C and C++ are the outliers here.

Although C++ is moving into a richer runtime, thus increasing the likelihood to write OS independent code without relying on third party libraries.

Even C, if POSIX had been part of ANSI C, would fall into this scenario.

In a way, UNIX can be seen as C's original runtime.