The Singularity project was started to re-examine design decisions of modern operating systems. The project consists of a microkernel operating system, C#-based programming language, and verification tools meant to address such shortcomings as security vulnerabilities, lack of robustness, and unexpected application interactions and failures. The three major features of Singularity are software-isolated processes (SIPs), use of contract-based channels for communication, and manifest-based programs (MBPs). SIPs were designed such that they could be easily garbage-collected; SIPs can only have pointers to their own memory or their memory on the exchange heap.
The authors place a huge amount of importance on safe, verified code, leading them to create Sing#. The overhead associated with run-time checking of the language accounts for an additional 4-5% of cycles, but the authors deem that an acceptable trade-off. It was interesting to note that the manifest-based configuration code syntax seems to be approaching Perl with its multiple dollar signs and forall keyword. Another interesting point was the distrust of the compiler Bartok and its ability to compile MSIL assuredly into safe native code.
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