"What happened" was two-fold:<p>1. Starting especially a few years before 2000 but continuing today, the software industry is quite profitable, pays well, and has lots of openings, while the a academic job market in systems research continues to pay poorly and has much more limited openings. So if you want to do systems software research while also having an enjoyable quality of life, you might as well go to a company and get paid well instead of spending your days writing a thesis and grant proposals.<p>2. Computer science is a field where the cost of basic research equipment is low (a computer), and more interesting research environments generally are beyond the scale of academia (tens of thousands of hardware nodes, hundreds or thousands or more QPS of production load, etc.). That makes it quite different from e.g. biology or high-energy physics on one end where you usually need to be in academia to get access to the equipment or e.g. mathematics (including theoretical CS) and literature on the other where it doesn't matter where you are; in systems research you only get access to the equipment from being in industry.<p>That doesn't mean that systems software research, done in industry, is (or was or will be) irrelevant; it means that the narrower definition of "research" as "that which is done in academia" is inaccurate (including industry with the trappings of academia, i.e., people at Google or Bell Labs writing papers in academic journals and hiring people with Ph.D.s). Systems software research happens in industry and is quite relevant to itself.
Virtualization. Capabilities. Kernel-bypass networking. Static code analysis. Verified-pointer microarchitectures. Coverage-guided fuzzing.<p>Systems software research has come a long way since 2000.
The last 19 years of systems software research have not refuted Rob's thesis. Industry has made incremental progress, academia has written papers but not built much that people want to use. Despite massive increases in graphics processing power, desktop UIs are still about the same as in 2000, just with more shininess.<p>And the number one thing that could have gotten better in the last 19 years but didn't: security.
I would argue that systems research has been incredibly relevant. First consider programming languages. Even though languages such as Java, C++, C# are all widely used, they are much different languages than they were in the early 2000’s. You can see the influences of academic research especially from the functional languages (monads) on these languages. Also, Rust is an exciting new language that is enabled by the systems software research of the past.<p>If you look at networking, recently, there has been the move towards new protocols (quic) that was the result of systems research looking at the deficiencies of tcp. Another area is consensus algorithms. We now have large scale real life deployments of consensus algorithms, for example Spanner and etcd.<p>The late 90’s and early 2000’s were a weird time where the hardware was improving so fast and taking software along for a free ride that a lot of software was good enough. Now, as we bump more into the end of Moore’s Law, we will be seeing more research and real life usage of multicore and heterogenous computing and libraries and languages and operating systems that try to make that easier.
M. Pike's followup, 4 years later, is at <a href="https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike-responds" rel="nofollow">https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-p...</a> .
Would research into side-channel attacks count under M. Pike's criteria?<p>Granted, whilst it is system-<i>level</i> it is not system <i>software</i>. And it has not yielded demos that people have regarded as <i>cool</i>, rather ones that have been received by some as horrifyingly worrying.<p>But it has definitely influenced industry.
This article predates it, but OS X (particularly after it mutated into iOS) represents probably the biggest source of systems innovation in the two decades after this article. Apple is very secretive, so their systems research often isn’t known outside the company until it’s actually going into a product.<p>OS X was modern for its time, but where they’ve really pushed the envelope is with iOS. They can simply move faster at scale than anyone else because they almost entirely own the IP for both the software and all major hardware components and can pivot on a dime compared to market-based coordination.
Soon it will take less time and be more cost-effective to commission the integration of an SoC for your application than to risk your business to software basket weavers.
I genuinely don't know what the author is refering to.<p>I'm amazed at how many comments resolve around "But wait, of course systems research has evolved, see XX and YYY", followed by responses along the lines of "Nah, he was not talking about XX and YYY, rather ZZZ, etc..."<p>I hate being the "please define xxx" guy, but is there a consensual definition of what "Systems software" is ?