Top Developer Joins Microsoft Next Generation OS Team

According to reports, Jonathan Shapiro, one of the primary designers of the BitC programming language and the related Coyotos operating system project, will be joining Microsoft to work on the company’s Midori project.

In an e-mail on the Coyotos mailing list, Shapiro said he had been interviewing at Google, DARPA and Microsoft. Said Shapiro:

“After a fair bit of soul-searching, I have decided to accept a fairly senior position at Microsoft associated with the Midori project. The current plan has me starting there at the beginning of August.”

Midori is a next-generation operating system project Microsoft is working on, which is an offshoot of the company’s Singularity operating system effort in Microsoft Research.

Shapiro has shepherded the development of BitC and Coyotos. According to the BitC language Website: “BitC is a new systems programming language. It seeks to combine the flexibility, safety, and richness of Standard ML or Haskell with the low-level expressiveness of C.”

Coyotos is a microkernel operating system being developed by The EROS Group. It is a successor to the EROS operating system that was created at the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University. Shapiro is managing director of The EROS Group and an assistant research professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins University.