November 3, 2015

Blogging about Midori

Enough time has passed that I feel safe blogging about my prior project here at Microsoft, “Midori.” In the months to come, I’ll publish a dozen-or-so articles covering the most interesting aspects of this project, and my key take-aways.

Midori was a research/incubation project to explore ways of innovating throughout Microsoft’s software stack. This spanned all aspects, including the programming language, compilers, OS, its services, applications, and the overall programming models. We had a heavy bias towards cloud, concurrency, and safety. The project included novel “cultural” approaches too, being 100% developers and very code-focused, looking more like the Microsoft of today and hopefully tomorrow, than it did the Microsoft of 8 years ago when the project began.

I worked on Midori from 2009 until we transitioned the teams to their respective new homes during 2012-2014. I led the groups focusing on the developer experience: language, compilers, core frameworks, concurrency models, and IDEs/tools. And I wrote lots of code the whole time.

Although we started with C# and .NET, we were forced to radically depart in the name of security, reliability, and performance. Now, I am helping to bring many of those lessons learned back to the shipping products including, perhaps surprisingly, C++. Most of my blog entries will focus on the key lessons that we’re now trying to apply back to the products, like asynchrony everywhere, zero-copy IO, dispelling the false dichotomy between safety and performance, capability-based security, safe concurrency, establishing a culture of technical debate, and more.

I’ll be the first to admit, none of us knew how Midori would turn out. That’s often the case with research. My biggest regret is that we didn’t OSS it from the start, where the meritocracy of the Internet could judge its pieces appropriately. As with all big corporations, decisions around the destiny of Midori’s core technology weren’t entirely technology-driven, and sadly, not even entirely business-driven. But therein lies some important lessons too. My second biggest regret is that we didn’t publish more papers. This blog series may help to recitify some of this.

I shall update this list as new articles are published:

Midori was a fascinating journey, and the most fun I’ve had in my career to-date. I look forward to sharing some of that journey with you.