It sounds absolutely fascinating, but it's a little sad that it did not go beyond the research stage. Like building a flying car and then hiding it in a garage. I understand how difficult it would have been for Microsoft to turn Midori into a product, but still I would like to see what that would have been like.
I don't agree. I think it's one of the strength of a large corp like MS. They are able to separate research and prototyping from product development.
You don't turn a research project into a product. You learn from it and incorporate it into your products
I think they could have turned it into a product if they had wanted to.
They had, however, a very, very good reason not to - it probably would not have been backwards compatible with Win32, so the huge amount of third-party software that exists today could not have run on it. And that - whether one likes Windows or not - is a very compelling selling point.
So things they learned building Midori will trickle back into the Windows/.Net world. I agree that that is what a good research department is for.
But still, it would have been nice to take Midori for a test drive and see what it would have been like.
Well, as I understand it, several of the Midori devs are now working on the Roslyn compiler and/or the CLR. So so of the lessons learnt will make it into the runtime, so at least that's something.
But yeah it would be nice if they could open-source it.
