Comment by andai

This is relevant to what I have been learning about recently!

I'm getting ready to launch an online game and I'm dealing with "how do I just run my game server on dozens of boxes without dealing with linux stuff".

I don't really have an answer yet (leaning into "just get one really powerful box" lol), but my investigation into the problem so far has been pretty interesting.

You can conceptualize the "my program + the OS" as a single program. It's not a pretty picture. Lots of global mutable state. (Also it randomly modifies itself??)

The whole point of Docker appears to be "I just want to run my program", in the least painful way possible. Immutable Linux extends the "lean in the direction of sanity" idea. (The programming and OS worlds seem to be learning the same lessons, from different angles.)

And then there's "it turns out the OS solves problems I don't have, while creating many new problems", which leads to Unikernels. Fun stuff ;)

In a perfect world, I wouldn't need the OS at all. Docker gives me two Linuxes to worry about! The number of operating systems I want to worry about is zero!

Which brings us to Unikernels! Just ditch the OS! Technically the right answer, except... now I'm a kernel developer? Maybe that's the least bad option, long term.