A non-Windows OS? Microsoft drops clues

"X" marks the targeted M# spot, according to this illustration by Midori team member Joe Duffy.

(Credit:Joe Duffy)

Over the past couple of weeks, there were two interesting developments around Microsoft's "Midori" operating system project.

First, I heard from two of my contacts that Midori -- Microsoft's non-Windows-based operating system project -- moved into the Unified Operating System group under Executive Vice President Terry Myerson. (Before that, it was an incubation project, without a potential commercialization home inside the company.)

Secondly, Microsoft officials seemingly gave the green light to some of the Midori team to go public with more details about the project. Specifically, Joe Duffy, one of the Midori team members, blogged on December 27 about the language used to develop Midori, which the Midori team built alongside the OS itself.

That language, codenamed "M#," ("M Sharp") according to several different sources of mine, is an extension of Microsoft's C# language. According to a self-identified former Softie on a Reddit thread discussing Duffy's post, this new language "grew out of Sing#, the system language of Microsoft Research's Singularity OS."

And according to Duffy's post about the new language, which he calls "C# for Systems Programming," this new language may ultimately be open sourced. But before that happens, Duffy and his cohorts plan to reimplement M# on top of Microsoft's still-unfinished "Roslyn" compiler-as-a-service technology.

Midori: What we've gleaned so far
A skunkworks team inside Microsoft has been working on Midori since at least 2008 (which is the first time I blogged about the Midori codename and effort). The Midori team can trace its early roots to "Singularity" the Microsoft Research-developed microkernel-based operating system written as managed code.

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Midori originally was championed by Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Eric Rudder. The Midori team consisted of a number of all-star Microsoft veterans (including Duffy), plus some additional high-flying developers from outside the company.

Early Midori design documents indicated that the Midori OS would be built with distributed concurrency and cloud computing in mind. Microsoft also supposedly planned to try to provide some kind of compatibility path between Windows and Midori (which isn't based on Windows at all). The early design documents also indicated that Microsoft Research's "Bartok" ahead-of-time compiler work influenced the team.

Duffy made a couple of public presentations and published papers in the ensuing years that indicated he and his colleagues were working on some kind of extensions to Microsoft's C# language. In his new blog post, Duffy elaborated on this, noting that M# (a codename he never uses himself) "should be seen (as) more of a set of extensions to C# -- with minimal breaking changes -- than a completely new language."

Duffy explained that the team made a conscious decision to work from C# as a base, rather than C

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