Microsoft launched two new operating systems in late October; Windows 8 for Intel and AMD processors and Windows RT for ARM-based chips. Windows Phone 8 will be in the hands of the public on Friday. However, the company is still the middle of working on a new OS that is not based on the Windows kernel. The project hasn"t exactly been given a huge marketing push in Times Square.
ZDNet.com reports that the project is called Midori and it"s actually been quietly in the works for a number of years. However, there"s been no word about its current status for some time. That changed with a presentation at the OOPSLA 2012 conference in October and a research paper called "Uniqueness and Reference Immutability for Safe Parallelism."
In part, the paper states:
Our type system models a prototype extension to C# that is in active use by a Microsoft team. We describe their experiences building large systems with this extension.... A source-level variant of this system, as an extension to C#, is in use by a large project at Microsoft, as their primary programming language.
Again, Microsoft has yet to shine a huge light on "Midori" but since it"s been in in the works for several years now, it"s likely that we will hear something about this non-Windows OS in the near future.
Source: ZDNet.com
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