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Comment by skavi | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to see a mention of Fuchsia on a big Google announcement. Is the project still truly alive? Are the ambitions still as grand? Is the team as stacked as it used to be?

Also, a link to the rust root of Zircon in case anyone else was interested: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/main/z...

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It obviously is pretty low key on the public relations front, but it's also very active as a project and I think it would be weird to look at their commit rate and conclude that the project is dead. If Fuchsia is dead then 99% of major open source projects are dead by the same standards.

I’m more interested in whether it’s still a thing people want to work on rather than something people are forced to maintain.

Working on a novel OS seems like it would fun to work on....

They got heavily hit in the January 2023 layoff cycle.

Had the same thought. On the wikipedia, it only mentions Fuschia used on the Google Nest Hub, which probably means it's used on a decent number of devices, but would think it was such a great OS, they would have used it for something like the upcoming GoogleBook.

Fuschia is not a desktop OS. It's designed for lower end or embedded hardware. Besides, Android has the highly profitable app ecosystem so it makes more financial sense to build GoogleBook based on that.

It wasn’t actually. From the docs for Zircon (Fuchsia’s kernel) [0]:

> Zircon targets modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors, non-trivial amounts of ram with arbitrary peripherals doing open ended computation.

Fuchsia also had a Linux compatibility layer similar to WSL1 at some point. Might still be there?

[0]: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/kernel/zx_and_lk

Interesting. Have heard many times that Google has become risk adverse. Maybe fomr something like Android, they just don't want to rock the profitable boat that it has become by switching out the core OS? ... Also now that we're talking, maybe it's just too much work to do so. Backwards compatibility seems like it'd be a nightmare, especially with all the device drivers.

Just because the underlying kernel (Zircon) is designed to be good for both phones and computers doesn’t mean that Fuchsia (which is just an OS that uses that kernel) is.

Fuchsia is the only OS that uses that kernel.

Also, that was an easily citable doc line, but I think a more comprehensive look at the work done in Fuchsia shows it has or had ambitions to run on personal computers.

e.g.: fancy graphics stack, Linux compatibility layer, ideas about OS integrated cloud syncing, the original work on the Xi text editor.

That was the result of not being successful in development and then they shifted to it. It was not like this at beginning or by design.

Do you know what wasn’t successful?

Some of their smart devices are using it. They've been focusing on GoogleOS (merging Android + ChromeOS) for a while but when that's done I guess they may adopt some of Fuschia's work. But I doubt if there will ever be scaled efforts to replace the entire Kernel stacks, even with the frontier models it is going to be very hard.

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