Theseus

In prior work, we have shown that the underdiagnosed problem of state spill remains a barrier to realizing complex systems that are easy to maintain, evolve, and run reliably. This paper shares our early experience building Theseus from scratch, an OS with the guiding principle of eliminating state spill. Theseus takes inspiration from distributed systems to rethink state management, and leverages Rust language features for maximum safety, code reuse, and efficient isolation. We intend to demonstrate Theseus as a runtime composable OS, in which entities are easily interchangeable and can evolve independently without reconfiguring or rebooting.