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Comment by rememberlenny | Hacker News Reader

For anyone curious, this is actually a very big deal.

Fuchsia is a sort of secret Google project to redesign the operating system from scratch - with a focus of making multi-device interactions a base primative.

The goal is to make multi-device interactions easier and not dependent on pseudo HTTP initiated sockets/streams.

It’s very exciting and hopefully makes it possible to have all the devices you are working with easily work together. For example, pull up content on your phone, pass it to your TV, interact with it on your keyboard, sync with your smart watch, etc.

The opposite today would be depending on a series of memory issues or depending on browsers or socket/protocols to manage a series of interactions between devices.

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OS IPC is nothing new, that is how COM works, and Project Treble has added a Fuchsia like layer to Android.

By the way, it isn't that secret, because not only you can track the development on the open, there is at least one device shipping Fuchsia in production.

> with a focus of making multi-device interactions a base primative

Could you link to a source for that? I don't recall it being mentioned or shown in the video, and it's also not mentioned as core concept in their docs [1].

[1] https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts

It sounds like you just described the Apple ecosystem, and I don't mean that's a bad thing to have more than one reimagining of such.

Apple didn’t rewrite their OS to get there, however. I guess someone at Google needs a promotion.

Apple startet with this approach long ago. There was no "modern" approach to solve the problem. However today there is more knowledge to tackle this.

It's not obvious to me why baking-in network connectivity to the OS would be helpful, but Plan 9 thought so too!

> Under Plan 9, UNIX's everything is a file metaphor is extended via a pervasive network-centric filesystem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

I'm just an amateur plan9 user, but one thing it does is allow the application to be written as if it were just a local application. But because everything is just a file, you can have the application use remote resources just by changing what that file "points to" (the namespace of the application) without changing the application itself.

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