I haven’t watched this talk, but I worked on Fuchsia from the start (I’m no longer at Google) and want to clear up some common questions and misconceptions:<p>1. Fuchsia is a general-purpose operating system built to support Google’s consumer hardware.<p>2. It’s not designed to compete with or replace Android. Its goal is to replace Linux, which Android is built on. One big challenge it addresses is Linux’s driver problem. If Fuchsia succeeds, Android apps could run on it.<p>Fuchsia isn’t trying to replace Android. Its survival for over a decade—through layoffs and with hundreds still working on it—says a lot.<p>I can’t predict Fuchsia’s future, but it’s already running on millions of devices. The git logs show big strides in running Linux programs on Fuchsia without recompilation, as well as progress on the Android runtime. The best way to predict Fuchsia’s future is to look at its hardware architecture support and which runtime is getting attention.<p>Fuchsia’s success will likely depend more on market forces than on technical innovation. Linux is “good enough” for most needs, and its issues may not justify switching. The choice between sticking with Linux or moving to Fuchsia often favors Linux.<p>Still, I hope Fuchsia succeeds.
I wish message passing and capabilities based OS had taken off stronger in the 80s because I sometimes feel like there are design goals and approaches latent in what we do now, which we could have been advanced in before now, beyond research models.
I'm surprised this is still being worked on I was under the impression that Google abandoned this.<p>Also, I would be interested to see a comparison to the wasm component model as it also seems to want to do the same things docker containers do.
By getting rid of the GPL, users can't request the source code anymore:<p><a href="https://github.com/vsrinivas/fuchsia/blob/main/LICENSE">https://github.com/vsrinivas/fuchsia/blob/main/LICENSE</a><p>OpenWRT was born because companies were forced to give the source code back to users.
Xoogler here. I never worked on Fuchsia (or Android) but I knew a bunch of people who did and in other ways I was kinda adjacent to them and platforms in general.<p>Some have suggested Fuchsia was never intended to replace Android. That's either a much later pivot (after I left Google) or it's historical revisionism. It absolutely was intended to replace Android and a bunch of ex-Android people were involved with it from the start. The basic premise was:<p>1. Linux's driver situation for Android is fundamentally broken and (in the opinion of the Fuchsia team) cannot be fixed. Windows, for example, spent a lot of time on this issue to isolate issues within drivers to avoid kernel panics. Also, Microsoft created a relatively stable ABI for drivers. Linux doesn't do that. The process of upstreaming drivers is tedious and (IIRC) it often doesn't happen; and<p>2. (Again, in the opinion of the Fuchsia team) Android needed an ecosystem reset. I think this was a little more vague and, from what I could gather, meant different things to different people. But Android has a strange architecture. Certain parts are in the AOSP but an increasing amount was in what was then called Google Play Services. IIRC, an example was an SSL library. AOSP had one. Play had one.<p>Fuchsia, at least at the time, pretty much moved everything (including drivers) from kernel space into user space. More broadly. Fuchsia can be viewed in a similar way to, say, Plan9 and micro-kernel architectures as a whole. Some think this can work. Some people who are way more knowledgeable and experienced on OS design seem to be pretty vocal saying it can't because of the context-switching. You can find such treatises online.<p>In my opinion, Fuchsia always struck me as one of those greenfield vanity projects meant to keep very senior engineers. Put another way: it was a solution in search of a problem. You can argue the flaws in Android architecture are real but remember, Google doesn't control the hardware. At that time at least, it was Samsung. It probably still is. Samsung doesn't like being beholden to Google. They've tried (and failed) to create their own OS. Why would they abandon one ecosystem they don't control for another they don't control? If you can't answer that, then you shouldn't be investing billions (quite literally) into the project.<p>Stepping back a bit, Eric Schmidt when he was CEO seemed to hold the view that ChromeOS and Android could coexist. They could compete with one another. There was no need to "unify" them. So often, such efforts to unify different projects just lead to billions of dollars spent, years of stagnation and a product that is the lowest common denominator of the things it "unified". I personally thought it was smart not to bother but I also suspect at some point someone would because that's always what happens. Microsoft completely missed the mobile revolution by trying to unify everything under Windows OS. Apple were smart to leave iOS and MacOS separate.<p>The only fruit of this investment and a decade of effort by now is Nest devices. I believe they tried (and failed) to embed themselves with Chromecast<p>But I imagine a whole bunch of people got promoted and isn't that the real point?