Hacker News new | comments | show | ask | jobs | submit login The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video] (destroyallsoftware.com) 634 points by gary_bernhardt 235 days ago | comments tinco 234 days ago | link The reason why metal doesn't exist now is because you can't turn the memory protection stuff off in modern CPU's. For some weird reason (I'm not an OS/CPU developer) switching to long mode on an x86 cpu also turns on the mmu stuff. You just can't have one without the other. There's a whole bunch of research done on VM software managed operating systems, back when the VM's started becoming really good. Microsoft's Singularity OS was the hippest I think.[0] Perhaps that ARM cpu's don't have this restriction, and we will benefit from ARM's upmarch sometime? [0] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/ ----- gary_bernhardt 234 days ago | link I didn't want to go i...