Making stable kernels more stable

Communication is something to wrangle and have problems, but I'd say it's more about binding between components that can happen readily over a well-ordered communication path.

I definitely have seen wins when a lot of strategies are employed together. There are some systems built in erlang where many benefits were reaped by state management, controlled communication, obliviousness about local vs remote communication by default, and many other things combining to give more managability to the process. It's harder achieve those wins when the system doesn't give you the discipline tools to help ensure those things are done.

I'm suspicious that an operating system may be too low-level to use fancy tooling to help you get all those wins though. I'm definitely convinced that complex piles of C talking over messaging busses implementing a kernel does not give you a simple system or any easy wins.