Chapter 5

Operating systems

An operating system is a fiction machine: processes, files and virtual memory are inventions that programmers accept as bedrock, and the everyday concept of “a program” is one of its inventions. The chapter argues that much of the machinery layered on top – hypervisors, virtual machines, containers – is heavy-handed work undoing what the operating system imposed, and that a simpler alternative already exists rather than being hypothetical: the operating system as a library, where you import only the stack you need and your artifact becomes the sole program on the machine. Why that lost is trajectory and historical path dependence, not stupidity. Large systems accrete layers and redundancies instead of reinventing themselves into cleaner forms, as biology does, and there is probably wisdom in that; the yearning for simplicity may just be a romantic feeling. The value of the argument is as a thought experiment: the world does not have to be as it is.