Programming language implementations have features such as threads, memory management, type safety, and REPLs that duplicate some of the work done by the underlying operating system. The objective of hosting a language on bare metal is to unify the language implementation and operating system to have a lean system with no redundancy for running applications.

The Mimosa operating system consists of a minimal kernel built on C++ and Scheme. It contains a Scheme implementation of a hard drive (ATA) driver, keyboard (PS2), serial (8250 UART), FAT32 filesystem and a small real time clock manager. The project was built to experiment with developement of operating system using a high level functional language to study the developement process and the use of Scheme to build a fairly complex system.