unikernels were hard. key word: were.

Justin Cormack, who worked on MirageOS and Unikernel Systems back in the day, has been noticing what I've been noticing: people are discovering (or rediscovering) unikernels again. He's running a series of conversations on the topic for his newsletter, and I was first up. He emailed me, and five minutes later I was talking to him from the pub with a stein of beer in hand. We went deep on Mirage, Orleans, Haskell, Nix, Cursed and a whole lot more.Here's the gist, written up properly, with chapter links at the bottom if you want to jump to a specific part of the conversation. Justin's edited transcript is over at Ignore Previous Directions.Unikernels were hard. Key word: were. Now we have AI.what a unikernel is, and why they were hardI first ran into unikernels around 2015. I'd staffed up a team of Haskellers and gone pretty deep on functional programming. Where there are Haskellers, there are OCaml programmers, and from there you find MirageOS. Great idea. I played with it back then.A…