As I mentioned elsewhere, such an OS could have important performance benefits. GC could be made to be incremental at a fundamentally new level. In fact, incremental GC could be nothing more than a series of defrag copies that proceed at a rate just faster than new object creation. Such a system would rock for writing real-time systems.
Important performance benefits compared to what? Systems that are very performance sensitive typically don't use garbage collectors to begin with. They instead rely on techniques to avoid generating much garbage in the first place.
You're making my point for me here. This kind of technology might make it possible to write even more performant soft real-time systems but still have the productivity benefits of GC.
I don't think I am. Trading performance for productivity is completely different discussion. It sounded like the claim here was that immutability in the OS (whatever that means) might result in a system with better performance.
We have programming languages where everything is immutable (Haskell). This results in programming techniques that generate a lot of garbage. We have not seen that this results in programs with better performance than those that do not generate garbage to begin with. Why would it be different in an operating system?
Trading performance for productivity is completely different discussion.
The point is that you could possibly buy more for less in this trade off. It's not just GC. It's a close to pauseless incremental GC that might become available.
It's not so much that it has to be in an OS, though it seems it would be better in an OS, however.
