Google launches its third major operating system, Fuchsia

[Arthur]

Source: Ars Technica

 

Google is officially rolling out a new operating system, called Fuchsia, to consumers. The release is a bit hard to believe at this point, but Google confirmed the news to 9to5Google, and several members of the Fuchsia team have confirmed it on Twitter. The official launch date was apparently yesterday. Fuchsia is certainly getting a quiet, anti-climactic release, as it's only being made available to one device, the Google Home Hub, aka the first-generation Nest Hub. There are no expected changes to the UI or functionality of the Home Hub, but Fuchsia is out there. Apparently, Google simply wants to prove out the OS in a consumer environment.

 

Fuchsia has long been a secretive project. We first saw the OS as a pre-alpha smartphone UI that was ported to Android in 2017. In 2018, we got the OS running natively on a Pixelbook. After that, the Fuchsia team stopped doing its work in the open and stripped all UI work out of the public repository.

There's no blog post or any fanfare at all to mark Fuchsia's launch. Google's I/O conference happened last week, and the company didn't make a peep about Fuchsia there, either. Really, this ultra-quiet, invisible release is the most "Fuchsia" launch possible.

 

Fuchsia is something very rare in the world of tech: it's a built-from-scratch operating system that isn't based on Linux. Fuchsia uses a microkernel called "Zircon" that Google developed in house. Creating an operating system entirely from scratch and bringing it all the way to production sounds like a difficult task, but Google managed to do exactly that over the past six years. Fuchsia's primary app-development language is Flutter, a cross-platform UI toolkit from Google. Flutter runs on Android, iOS, and the web, so writing Flutter apps today for existing platforms means you're also writing Fuchsia apps for tomorrow.

 

Continues...

[psydii]

This sort of feels like NT where the initial secret sauce was Win32 (i.e. the apis that developers use was cross platform to the other major business desktop OS). It will probably be at least a decade before it almost takes over the world before being usurped buy a platform not owned by one of the big tech giants of the time.

 

(NT started in 1989 but wasn't released until 1993 and it was 2003 before it really hit its stride with XP, only to start loosing ground to Linux (via Andriod) in 2009/10. NT was also a microkernel at this stage of its life.)

 

I expect ChromeOS will be where Fuchsia goes before Andriod handsets. With Fuchsia acting a bit like a hypervisor to 'legacy' Chrome and Andriod layers. Strikes me that Windows with VBS and Fuchsia will end up being architecturally very similar.

 

Of course they've got to persuade developers to move over - MS tried that and failed (8/Phone), and Apple isn't having the best time, though arguably owning the entire stack and being highly profitable for developers gives them (Apple) the edge.

 

This is what might be called a hot take. I should probably go and read the article now.

Edited May 25, 2021 by psydii