They haven't given up yet.

The Mindori project is still secret, so who knows what they are doing there, while some of the team is nowadays playing with the concept of pico-hipervisors and running the full OS as a library instead.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/drawbridge/

I somehow hadn't noticed it, even thus its not new. Thanks :)

Well, there is a lot of interest in a secure, scalable, fast, deterministic, simple OS which is also backwards compatible. ;)

What do you mean by "safe" though? How is kernel-space safer then user-space?

Note that the part where I mentioned kernel and safe used quotes because its sarcastic.

The modern oses do have kernels that are much safer than what we use day to day, however. They're indeed not in C. In general the core is typed ASM and it runs a a managed language right on top. The kernel is generally written with that and uses various concepts that separate privileges as much as possible for security, reliability and predictability, basically. That includes kernel components, and obviously drivers. Messages between components are also generally declared ("contracted") with well defined types.

By being written in systems programming languages safer than C.

That would require building consensus around such a language. I mean, yes, this is one of my own hobby projects, but Rust is the most fully-developed attempt made so far and it still doesn't have the kind of developer backing that C did in the BSD days.

I am old enough to remember when C only had backing from people working on UNIX systems, while other systems were either using Assembly or another high level language e.g. PL/I, Algol or Pascal dialect.

This could catch some programming bugs, sure, but it wouldn't make the OS much safer. You can still have attacks on integrity, privacy and availability.

Agreed, but the attack window would be smaller, that is what counts.

If you really want to attack a system, nothing beats social engineering anyway.