Starting with a clean piece of paper, Microsoft is having a go at building a non-Windows operating system.

Code named Midori, it may never be released but if Midori isn’t heir to Windows Microsoft better have something else like it up its sleeve.

There have been rumblings about Midori but little information until Microsoft apparently took David Worthington, a reporter for Software Development Times, into its confidence. Anyway he says he “viewed internal Microsoft documents” and talked to a couple of Microsoft people.

He says the incubating Midori is a componentized, Internet-centric operating system predicated on the prevalence of connected systems that Microsoft is building from the ground up.

Not that all of the great Windows infrastructure disappears, swallowed up in some West Coast earthquake. Remnants of it still make more than cameo appearances.

For instance, Midori will run directly on native hardware – x84, x64, ARM – and is designed to be hosted on Hyper-V, Microsoft’s hypervisor, or even by a Windows process, David says.

And Midori applications are supposed to co-exist and interoperate with Windows apps as well as form a migration path. So there’s backward compatibility.

Microsoft’s vision retains .NET programming languages but breaks from the existing Windows GUI, “where applications must update their display on one and only one thread at a time,” which makes writing multithreaded applications a bear.

Midori is reportedly beholden to the experimental Singularity operating system Microsoft Research did; so its tools and libraries are completely managed code and dependencies between the application and the operating system and the application and the hardware are reduced if not eliminated.

Otherwise it’s focused on concurrency, both for distributed and local apps, David says. That’s why it’s built on an asynchronous-only architecture and introduces a higher-level application model called Asynchronous Promise Architecture that abstract the details of the physical machines and processors.

The architecture is embracing and imagines application running on everything from client/server and multi-tier topologies to P2P and cloud data centers. Theoretically everything should work together and Midori should tolerate the inevitable cancellations, latency and intermittent connectivity.

Midori has two kernels: a microkernel of unmanaged code that control hardware and a higher-level kernel providing the operating system functionality.

Microsoft’s programming model is supposed to make it easier to write to massively parallel devices. The widgetry is partial to SOA and should reduce some metadata complexity. It depends on a constrained model of state management.

Microsoft has in mind “to force developers to create applications that are correct by construction.”

See http://www.sdtimes.com/link/32627.