Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

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I'm in the process of trying to setup some things I'd like to seriously try in Docker containers (GNU Social and iodine for example). Now I want to try to get Sandstorm working in a container now as well. :-P

Honestly though I was talking about this exact concept that Sandstorm has implemented, a few years back. I was telling a buddy, "We have general purpose desktop OSes where we install apps. Why isn't there a building-block type server OS we do the same thing?"

Of course I'm sure like a million other programmers had that same idea, and it's am incredibly difficult one. Sandstorm seems to have a C++ base with Javascript frameworks on top of it. I'll totally put it on my list of things to try out.

The future is distributed.

> Why isn't there a building-block type server OS we do the same thing?

Because everything is built on Unix as an OS abstraction. Even Windows (since the early 2000s).

Consider: byte streams and file systems are less than ideal fundamental abstractions in a distributed world.

IMO we won't have what you're seeking until we rethink what an OS should be in an Internet-everywhere world. We're still using OS designs that predate the Internet entirely.

It would be nice to see a future where all applications have some concept of peer-to-peer networking and would be able to talk to each other. My hope is that this leads to blurring the line between having separate architectures for server, desktop and mobile apps, to the point where the only differences are reflected in the physical limitations of the device.

It's interesting to see how modern public cloud businesses seem to have borrowed a lot of their business models from old timesharing systems of the 70s. From there it's easy to analogize timesharing systems being killed off by personal computers to cloud computing being killed off by personal cloud.

Have you seen unikernel approaches like MirageOS (https://mirage.io), which challenge the POSIX basics of operating systems? If not, take a look :)

I can help create a very lightweight container image for this if you want?

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