> Reproducibility and uniformity of environment (...)
Shouldn't the unikernel approach actually improve reproducibility greatly? You build your application and all it's dependencies together, that should run exactly the same locally or on your Xen cloud.
That's exactly right. Since everything's a library, the normal OCaml dependency analysis pulls in a complete manifest of everything that goes into the final output. In the Xen output mode, this implies that the manifest contains everything. In the Unix backend, you still need to package up the kernel and library dependencies.
They're not on the same scale. It does improve both, but it improves isolation to a much much larger degree. It also makes the world inside significantly different from the world outside, so it takes a different knowledge base to be able to program effectively. Particularly if the inside is an OCaml program, tbh.
