On: Systems software research is still irrelevant

Not sure to agree; there are quite a few interesting projects in both OS and system programming language fields. To name a few:

OS

Mirage OS[1] and unikernels in general (ErlangOnXen, HalVM)

OSv [2]

Chromium OS [3]

Programming languages

Julia [4]

Rust [5]

D-Lang [6]

Nimrod [7]

[1] http://www.openmirage.org/

[2] http://osv.io/

[3] http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os

[4] http://julialang.org/

[5] http://www.rust-lang.org/

[6] http://dlang.org/

[7] http://nimrod-lang.org/