Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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 :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com