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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Before anyone kills me and yells that “OS development is hard!”, remember that Fuchsia was running on a Pixelbook, with a basic GUI, 4 years ago, with the first source code being posted 6 1/2 years ago. Now look at what Andreas Kling has accomplished in 4 years…

One can reasonably wonder if Fuschia is in development hell…

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Eh, I think there's always the danger of lack of urgency in a large corp and instead enjoy tweaking forever, but it ships on millions of devices, so it's not vaporware by any means. I just hope Google doesn't end up strangling it organizationally because they can't bring themselves to actually pull the trigger and replace the core of Android with it.

Exactly. See Nokia and how they Maemo/Meego saga

I remember Google upfront said when they started development of fuchsia that it would take seven years before there was anything to show. Cannot find the reference. I also remember Microsoft saying the same when they were fiddling with Midori (now canceled windows replacement). It appears that 7 - 10 years is the typical timeline when developing an OS from scratch.

Midori had a much more uphill battle due to drivers (which would all need to be totally rewritten in M#) and the total lack of sandboxing in Windows apps.

Phones are a static collection of hardware, so vendors will have an easier time with providing all drivers needed. And Android apps are much easier to sandbox, given they run on Dalvik and have capabilities and don't just run as root with access to /.

I'm still so sad Midori was never open-sourced..

Bing was running on Midori before the project was cancelled due to factor Sinofsky from Office leadership, well known for its COM and C++ love, and how Longhorn was killed as well after Office team jumped into the mix.

To be fair; given the evidence of that timeline are Fuchsia and Midori, I think the more accurate statement is that the timeline for developing an OS from scratch is not less than 7 years, with an infinite upper bound.

Fuchsia shipped on Google Home Hubs, upgrading them in the field (replacing everything from firmware up). We did so without breaking them all.

Why? Did Fuschia enable any new features on Google Home Hubs which would have been more difficult/impossible with a Linux kernel? It's an honest question, my bias is that Fuschia is a solution in search of a problem but I am happy to be convinced otherwise.

Fuchsia has a significantly better security stance, in both implementation and in architecture.

Hubs are fully vendor locked in, and Google controls every single but running there. Security argument, while valid like everywhere, seems BS. I’d be surprised if security profile for a hub was main concern for the product.

Anecdotally my hub got much less responsive around the Fuchsia update. I’m not blaming Fuchsia directly for it, but one could wonder what would happen, if resources dedicated to that, were spent on usability improvements.

Let’s be honest, Fuchsia was rolled to a Hub, because it’s a product no one really cares about and team needed some guinea pig/stuff in production to justify its existence. I say that confidently, as someone working at big tech, and having myself experience being in rollouts like that.

The Nest team definitely won't agree with your value judgement of these devices, nor do many of the users who paid for them. To this end, even if there are different motivations for different teams and other tactical considerations, it is absolutely necessary for the owning team of a product to have a real motivation for such a significant operation as replacing the entire firmware and runtime in the field. That set of motivations are rooted in the properties of the OS: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts

What was the security issue with whatever the original OS was? It's not like I'm installing any apps on these things.

Maybe because Google has the focus of a crack addled flea?

The same Google that is actively developing three unrelated consumer operating systems that a few years ago introduced three incompatible messaging apps at one event.

I've heard that at google (urban legend?) the best way to advance is to start a promising project that catches the eyes of managers as a potential money maker, get a very basic prototype going, and had it off to a team and then move on to your next big "money maker" idea. The people who "maintain" never really get much attention from management

I think that’s the way at most companies unfortunately. Maintenance is a cost centre while a new product is a potential revenue stream (until it too becomes a cost centre).

Heeey, AFAIK all three messaging apps were on one of them. The other two OSes didn't peddle any chat apps.

I was wrong, they actually had four at the same time.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/allo-duo-goo...

Google has made way too many chart apps, but this article is disingenuous; Duo is a video calling app, not a messaging app.

I don’t think that’s the argument that you think it is…

The other apps also do video.

Fuchsia debuted seven years ago and was in development even before that. And it hasn't been cancelled more than 80% of the team remains.

Crack addled flea? That's how you'd describe seven years?

Fuchsia never really cared for a particular GUI. They made a couple of shells which could only really be called demos because they ended up removed later.

https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/development/hardware/intel_n...

Hmm, Fushcia builds a whole new kernel in a different paradigm and then a userspace upon that. Android was built upon an existing and mature kernel. It doesn’t surprise me that Fushcia takes longer.

It doesn't really. Fuschia is a fairly standard microkernel design written in C++. Their big idea was a sea of internet components but it doesn't seem to have worked out? Where's the eye-catching Xerox PARC style demos of what they spent so many years figuring out?

Andreas Kling develops Serenity OS, a new from scratch open source OS and kernel in C++, what does Android have to do with it?

Sorry. I assumed that the person you named was responsible for Android, given how that would have been a good comparing target for Fushcia.

For this to mean anything, you will have to make the claim that Fuchsia is more similar to Serenity OS than Android or any other full scale OS project. And if it truly is closer to the pet project, then that's not a good sign for a company like Google, who is paying X number of engineers to work on this

one good way to slow things down is to add more people

Especially Perf(now GRAD)-evaluated people who care about promotions and performance reviews. Which is of course completely normal, not blaming the individual engineer here. Engineering directions just start taking weird turns that don't make that much sense globally, but locally they're the best course of action.

Not sure why you're being downvoted for this. It's true. From what I could see, the Fuchsia team had basically unlimited headcount and blew up into an absolutely massive thing in a short period of time. They still missed deadline after deadline.

Overall my experience at Google, esp in consumer hardware and things touching it, can be summarized as: Has a single person here read (or heard about) The Mythical Man Month?

There is no part of this statement that is true. Fuchsia never had "unlimited headcount" (early on there was a buffer more than needed but our VP told use we couldn't hire too quickly as to not to overwhelm things and then later that buffer was taken away in reorgs when it was actually needed later which meant we had to do more with less). Fuchsia also never missed deadlines we made outside of the team. Any delays to market were not the fault of Fuchsia team itself but delays our internal partners needed.

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