The last months, I spent some time reading up about Midori, a (new) OS created by Microsoft. Midori was incubated as an operating system written entirely in C# that achieved performance comparable with production operating systems, minus the security and reliability problems found in OSes written in C or C++.
Although Midori was abandoned, there are a lot of key lessons they learned along the way.
Joe Duffy, a development manager and language architect on Midori, shared a series of a blog posts about his work on Midori:
- A Tale of Three Safeties
- Objects as Secure Capabilities
- Asynchronous Everything
- Safe Native Code
- The Error Model
- Performance Culture
More information about the history of Midori can be found here: http://www.zdnet.com/article/whatever-happened-to-microsofts-midori-operating-system-project/
Update: Joe Duffy did a session at QCon New York where he explained some of the lessons learned during the project.