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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

What happened to the Fuchsia project?

It's still going and Google still refuses to explain why it exists. It was rumored that some of the team was laid off during recent cost cutting.

It’s not rumored. It was widely reported on and many people discussed their impact publicly.

Fuchsia is shipping on real devices today (their home hubs) although yea it’s not clear why, they now have quite a few operating systems they manage.

1. Android of course. Chrome casts and phones and tablets use this.

2. Fuchsia for the home hubs.

3. ChromeOS for the chromebooks and stuff.

4. GCP probably has a cloud Linux like AWS but tbh I’m not familiar.

They’ve killed “castOS” which was a very limited Linux based system I think.

So more like

1. Linux - with some variations of user land based on use case. Primarily ChromeOS and Android.

2. Fuchsia - with unknown motivations and use cases

castOS was a stripped-down Android.

Rumor has it, it may eventually replace Linux as the underlying OS to Android/ART. By now I'm thinking G's leadership is realizing the epic undertaking it would mean to bring Fuchsia to maturity... and I give Fuchsia a 50/50 chance of ending up in the vast Google graveyard (https://killedbygoogle.com/) in the next 5 years.

I'm curious why they couldn't poach one of the L4 microkernels to build Fuchsia on, specifically SEL4 which is used in Genode/SculptOS, same as they did with Linux and Android. It would've given them a strong base to build on, saved time/$$$....

They tried that too... https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/10/announcing-kataos-...

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