14 DAY TRIAL // Work continues on Microsoft’s non-Windows Midori operating system, a Microsoft Research project based on the Singularity platform.
The Redmond company is not confirming this officially, but the detail can be inferred from information made public recently by Joe Duffy, a lead architect on an OS incubation project at Microsoft. (spotted first by Mary-Jo Foley)
Duffy is leading the team responsible for “multiple aspects of a research operating system’s programming model.”
While no specific project is mentioned in the blog post published by Duffy the past month, however, the new positions are required either for Midori, or for another Microsoft Research incubation operating system.
And while the software giant is bound to have more platform-related projects cooking, there are a variety of hints pointing to the fact that Microsoft is indeed hiring for Midori.
“The three main areas are concurrency, languages, and frameworks,” Duffy said.
“When I say concurrency, I mean things like asynchrony and message passing, data and task parallelism, distributed parallelism, runtime scheduling and resource management, and heterogeneity and GPGPU.
“When I say languages, I mean type systems, mostly-functional programming, verified safe concurrency, and both front- and back-end compilation.
“And when I say frameworks, I mean virtually anything you could imagine wanting out of a platform framework: all things XML, data interoperability (database, web services, etc.), collections, transactions, multimaster synchronization, and even low level things, like regex, numerics, and globalization,” he added.
In the very few details that leaked on Midori in the past, concurrency, distributed computing and parallelism were placed at the core of the incubation OS.
Microsoft has yet to say what the future holds for Midori, but fact is that the platform has been in development for quite some time, and it continues to survive.
As is the case with all Microsoft Research projects, incubation is no guarantee that the Midori will ever become an actual product.
If your coding skills are enough, Duffy is accepting requests to join his team. And if you do get to work on Midori after you read this article, then by all means, share some juicy details on the OS with the rest of us.
“Our team is 100% developers, and we have an “everybody codes, everybody loves to code” culture. Even managers are expected to spend a significant amount of time prolifically writing code,” Duffy explained.
“All of these components are new and built from the ground up. So self-drive and an ability to have a vision and make it happen are incredibly important.”