HACKER Q&A
📣 pc2g4d

Evolutionary Operating Systems?


I can't help but notice the similarity between an OS instance and an organism. It has a boundary and defenses (firewall), various ways of interacting with its environment (network), it has resources and "organs" of its own (processes, RAM, nonvolatile storage) etc. The instances don't (yet) themselves reproduce, but are cloned ad infinitum.

The metaphor goes further when recognizing that computer "viruses" infect these "organisms", commandeering their capabilities for propagation.

What if we treated an OS instance more fully like an organism, and allowed it to evolve and "fight" for its survival? Could it become more secure by virtue of its survival being on the line?

What if OSes could reproduce sexually?

I know this is getting weird but... we use genetic algorithms to evolve solutions to problems.

Is there a place for evolving the operating system itself?

  👤 smoldesu Accepted Answer ✓
Well, the biggest problem is that Operating Systems need a common interface to share software/application/service support, generally. Allowing a 'Cambrian Explosion' of Operating Systems would present a problem where we don't have common software, and everyone's development efforts are strewn all over the place. What you're really describing is the world of alternative Operating Systems, of which there are many cool things to check out (Fedora Silverblue, HaikuOS, Free/Open/NetBSD, etc.) Most of these platforms share a degree of API support (however faint that support may be), which allows them to try extremely experimental things while retaining a large amount of software support.

If your question is "what do mutations/evolutions of modern OSes look like", look at the ongoing friendly competition between Guix and NixOS. Both OSes have radical features like declarative configuration and generational base systems, but they go about implementing them in different ways. Two species of the same genus, two families with similar religions. Similarly, the BSDs have a lot of cool things that completely stray from Unix/Linux spec, and their own strange internal conflicts/rivalries.