Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jul 27, 2026

Midori (operating system)

Midori is an experimental managed code operating system (OS) that was in development until 2015. A joint effort by Microsoft and Microsoft Research, it had been reported to be a possible commercial implementation of the OS Singularity, a research project begun in 2003 to build a highly dependable OS whose kernel, device drivers, and application software would all be written in managed code. It was designed for concurrency, and would run a program spread across multiple nodes at once. It also featured a security model that sandboxes applications for increased security. Microsoft had mapped out several possible migration paths from Windows to Midori. Midori was discontinued some time in 2015, though many of its concepts were used in other Microsoft projects.

Last revised
Jul 27, 2026
Read time
≈ 2 min
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431 w
Citations
9
Source
Wikipedia ↗
Midori
DeveloperMicrosoft Corporation
Written inC# custom variant M#
OS familyCapability-based
Working stateDiscontinued1
Initial release2008 (2008)
Final releaseFinal / 2015 (2015)
Update methodCompile from source code
Supported platformsIA-32, x86-64, ARM
Kernel typeMicrokernel (Language-based)

Midori (which means green in Japanese) is an experimental managed code operating system (OS) that was in development until 2015. A joint effort by Microsoft and Microsoft Research, it had been reported23 to be a possible commercial implementation of the OS Singularity, a research project begun in 2003 to build a highly dependable OS whose kernel, device drivers, and application software would all be written in managed code. It was designed for concurrency, and would run a program spread across multiple nodes at once.4 It also featured a security model that sandboxes applications for increased security.5 Microsoft had mapped out several possible migration paths from Windows to Midori.6 Midori was discontinued some time in 2015, though many of its concepts were used in other Microsoft projects.

History

The code name Midori was first discovered through the PowerPoint presentation CHESS: A systematic testing tool for concurrent software.7

Another reference to Midori was found in a presentation shown during the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) October 2012 conference,8 and a paper9 from the conference's proceedings.

References

References

  1. Foley, Mary Jo (10 November 2015). "Whatever happened to Microsoft's Midori operating system project?". ZDNet. CBS Interactive.
  2. Foley, Mary Jo (30 June 2008). "Goodbye, XP. Hello, Midori". ZDNet. CBS Interactive.
  3. Oiaga, Marius (2008-06-30). "Life After Windows: Microsoft Midori Operating System". Softpedia. Retrieved 2008-07-22.
  4. Worthington, David (2008-07-29). "Microsoft's plans for post-Windows OS revealed". SD Times. Archived from the original on November 16, 2012.
  5. Worthington, David (2008-08-05). "Microsoft's Midori to sandbox apps for increased security". SD Times. Archived from the original on December 22, 2009.
  6. Worthington, David (2008-07-31). "Microsoft maps out migration from Windows". SD Times. Archived from the original on July 1, 2013.
  7. Musuvathi, Madanlal; Qadeer, Shaz; Ball, Thomas (November 2007). CHESS: A systematic testing tool for concurrent software (Report). Microsoft. Retrieved 2008-07-22.
  8. Foley, Mary Jo (November 8, 2012). "Microsoft's Midori operating-system skunkworks project soldiers on". ZDnet. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 2012-11-08.
  9. Gordon, Colin; Parkinson, Matthew; Parsons, Jared; Bromfield, Aleks; Duffy, Joe (October 2012). "Uniqueness and Reference Immutability for Safe Parallelism". Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications. OOPSLA '12. Tucson, Arizona, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 21–40. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.365.5541. doi:10.1145/2384616.2384619.
External links