Library Operating Systems for the Desktop

On 15 April, the Cambridge Ring, the alumni society of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, named our paper "Functional Networking for Millions of Docker Desktops" its Publication of the Year. I wrote the paper with my Cambridge colleagues Anil Madhavapeddy, Dave Scott, Patrick Ferris, and Ryan Gibb. It describes how we rebuilt Docker Desktop's networking stack in OCaml: a small VM and a set of host-side daemons, built on MirageOS libraries, doing the system-level plumbing that lets Linux containers reach the outside world on the developer's macOS or Windows laptop. As our 2013 ASPLOS paper was titled "Unikernels: Library Operating Systems for the Cloud", this 2025 ICFP paper could have been titled "Library Operating Systems for the Desktop". Same architecture, different vertical, same low-level libraries written in a high-level language (OCaml)! After the first internal Piñata demo (October 2015). Shipped as Docker for Mac beta three months later. From running mDNS on…