With our Linux-based unikernel you can make small adjustments to the application -- usually just a handful of lines of code -- and get big performance improvements, like 25% or so. We had a paper about this at Eurosys'23: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3552326.3587458
That‘s the problem of unikernels. There are papers how great they are but almost nobody is using them. If applications could easily get a 25% boost without much work they would do it.
But nobody is using it. So I am not trusting the „benefits“.
There are a ton of well known techniques in computer science that will make software faster, more reliable or better in other ways, that people don't use, yet really work.
I mean, if I had an easy-enough way to use them, I absolutely would.
Docker isn’t ideal, but it’s common, and the UX is decent enough. If a unikernel solution existed with near-enough quality of UX and deployment, I’d 100% switch.
> But nobody is using it.
The development community at large often chooses to use/not-use things (packaging solutions, tooling, engineering approaches, software architectures, etc) for a huge variety of reasons, not all of them based in any kind of logic or benefit. I suspect microkernels could become a viable solution for some things, they just need a “docker moment”.
