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IMO a lot of the complexity of what an OS comes from:

* the illusion of multi-tasking! (context switching) (when you have one CPU-core)

* the bridge to your hardware! (e.g. ignoring the basics like your CPU/RAM/motherboard/IO devices, network interfaces themselves are an endless, unreliable torrent of data!)

* security! (unless you are literally God and make everything yourself, you have to trust ~something~ external)

* and more....

and complexity for CPUs (even ignoring legacy cruft) comes from :

* Branch prediction

* Register renaming

* Optimizing dat IPC

* More hacks for performance!

* Performance!!!

* and more....

Because at the end of the day, no matter how "simple" things are, creating the universe from scratch is never simple



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