Hurd has always seemed cool from the purist viewpoint of, "Let's prove to the world that we can do everything using a microkernel!"-- and to be frank, as a Haskell lover, it would be hypocritical for me to fault anyone for this level of purity!--but development has been plodding along for decades, with the article claiming (unless I misread it) that they are still working on things like SMP and 64-bit support.

I mean, as long as the people tinkering with this are having fun then that is all that really matters, and more power to them! However, that really seems to be the entirety of its purpose at this point, which is a shame given the lofty ambitions with which the project was launched.