> My point is that the technology isn't that hard.
I disagree - the technology is extremely hard. You're talking centuries of staff-hours to make your OS, if you want it to be a robust general-purpose OS and not a toy. Just the bit where you say you want the computer to scan what's in your hands and identify it? That in itself is extraordinarily difficult. You mischaracterise the task at hand by pretending it's simple.
I think the article gave that as an example of what the system should enable, rather than a prerequisite for launch. The system wide message bus and semantic shortcuts features should make it really easy for developers of advanced peripherals to plug into the system.
For example, a Kinect would be a lot more useful in ideal OS. You could bind gestures to window manager commands, for example.
Unfortunately, it's wholly impractical to do real work with message busses alone if you want to maximize performance.
See: Every performance inter-process system ever...
Could we cover a number of cases with copy-on-write semantics and system transactional memory? Sure, but the tech isn't broadly available yet, and it wouldn't cover everything.
Sometimes you just need to share a memory mapping and atomically flip a pointer...
It doesn't have to be implemented as a message bus. It should just be a message bus semantically. Under the hood we could implement all sorts of tricks to make it faster, as long as the applications don't notice the difference.
I would expect that to work to a point, but coherence and interlocking are eventually going to rear their ugly heads.
I've created and lived with multiple inter-process high-performance multimedia/data systems (e.g. video special effects and editing, real-time audio processing, bioinformatics), and I've yet to encounter a message passing semantic that could match the performance of manually managed systems for the broad range of non-pathological use-cases, not to speak of the broader range of theoretically possible use-cases.
If something's out there, I'd love to see it. So far as I know, nobody has cracked that nut yet.
I disagree - the technology is extremely hard. You're talking centuries of staff-hours to make your OS, if you want it to be a robust general-purpose OS and not a toy. Just the bit where you say you want the computer to scan what's in your hands and identify it? That in itself is extraordinarily difficult. You mischaracterise the task at hand by pretending it's simple.