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Comment by j2kun

17 hours ago

Wouldn't it be Fuchsia?

Fuchsia ended up in some Google products, such as Nest Hub, Nest Hub Max, and Google's smart speakers, thermostats and displays.

But Fuchsia won't be in the Googlebook because there's no Chrome browser for Fuchsia. (In early 2024, Google officially stopped trying to port the full, desktop version of Chrome to Fuchsia.)

The dream of Fuchsia is effectively dead, and aside from some older Nest devices, Google only remaining efforts with the OS is basically as a tiny runtime that they'll run in VMs on Android for some secure process needs.

It was just a speculative research project and a bunch of bloggers went wild declaring it the end of Android, Linux (Android of course sitting on Linux), ChromeOS, etc. That was never real.

  • 45 commits landed in the repository so far today, it's mid way through the work day in the valley. https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/q/status:merged

    Zircon is still under development with recent RFC's extending the memory synchronization and attribution model for processes.

    There was also more extension added to one of the key disk formats in March which has an eye to more flexible long term evolution and adaptation to particular device form factors.

    The publicly available evidence does nothing to support your claims, entirely the opposite.

    I used to work on Fuchsia, I have not for many years now and have no idea what their current roadmap looks like, but I do know where to actually look up what's been done recently, which is all public and you could do as well.

    Anyway I have no idea if this has any fuchsia code in it.

    • >45 commits landed in the repository so far today

      Okay? Is this impressive? Do you think it shows something? Bizarrely whenever people point out how much of a flop Fuchsia is (relative to the hype a decade ago), there is always someone like you citing commit count. Weird.

      The vast majority of the commits are tiny commits to change a version number or rename a test. Or to pass some lint tests. I know tiny two man shops that have much more substantial commits each day.

      I didn't say it was dead, though did I? Not quite sure what kicked off your bizarre defensive, asshole-ish screed. I specifically said that it most likely will be a tiny runtime for VM processes in Android.

      But Fuchsia, announced A DECADE AGO, remains utterly irrelevant, aside from a couple of poorly received, dogshit Nest devices. And we know that Google massively downsized the team and basically moved on, and from people I've talked to it is now basically a make work project.

      Yeah, the chances that Fuchsia powers this device is 0.0000%. I hugely doubt it even appears on the device at all.

      So the dream, as constantly restated on here, is pretty clearly absolutely dead.

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  • Calling it "just a speculative research project" is severely underestimating how big of an effort Fuschia was. At its peak it had a couple hundred eng IIRC.

    • I don't think that description underestimates it at all. Google took a moonshot and threw a lot of resources at it, but they in no way put eggs in that basket so when it didn't yield something substantial they just scattered the team and now they keep trying to get something out of that investment.