I wonder why unikernels haven't caught on. Years ago when they started to be hyped, I imagined the technology would surpass the adoption of containers. In principle, they have the security and isolation of VMs which containers lack, but also have even less overhead than containers, and can run on bare metal. It sounds like the best of both worlds.

The main issues years ago were developer tooling, packaging, and difficulty with debugging, so the UX was far from what Docker did for containers. But I was hoping that these issues would be addressed (are they?), and that a defacto standard would emerge that would propel them into the mainstream. Instead, we have these disparate niche tools and services that seem to be competing, but there's no widespread industry adoption.

I'm sure that the evolution of the container ecosystem made unikernels less desirable, and the increased popularity of container orchestration engines like Kubernetes cemented this trend. But I wish that the unikernel ecosystem were more mature so that it's at least a topic of conversation in tech circles, and k8s wasn't such an obvious choice. Though I might be in the wrong circles and have outdated information, so I'm curious to know what HN thinks.

Erlang’s cluster spawn + a unikernel model would be a match made in heaven.

I do understand what you are asking for though. There used to be an older project called erlang-on-xen: https://github.com/cloudozer/ling .

It'd be great to see this idea revisited although you'll need to create some sort of new handling/framework.