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by samhw 1527 days ago
From what I can see, the Fuchsia kernel is actually quite interesting. I like the foci on (1) capabilities and (2) message passing. It's not the most innovative thing in the known universe - in fact both of those concepts are of pretty late-80s-to-early-90s vintage, from the OOP boom when programmers were misspending their ill-gotten performance gains[0] – but they make a degree of sense. The userspace bits I'm less sure about. Like you say, it seems to be a non-GPL-ed clone of Linux. It's the kind of thing I'd expect of some cheap Chinese company. This kind of fragmentation is emphatically not a good thing for our industry and Google knows it, and I very much hope they don't get away with it, but I suspect its being a clone is exactly why it'll be a very easy transition to force on end-users. Programmers will never in a million years use it on the server side, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
1 comments
mustache_kimono 1527 days ago
> Programmers will never in a million years use it on the server side, though.

Why not? Certain people are using microkernels, for christsakes. Why not Fuschia on the server?

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teddyh 1527 days ago
The biggest obstacle might be drivers. A “server” is defined more loosely than “an Android phone”. An Android phone manufacturer has the incentive to make sure that drivers for that hardware exist in Android, regardless if Android is Linux-based or Fuchsia-based. And Google can make Android switch to Fuchsia, and therefore can control where that incentive leads. Google, however, does not control what runs on servers, and server hardware manufacturers know that if they don’t have a driver in Linux, they won’t sell very much of their hardware, since existing hardware run Linux-based systems.
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mustache_kimono 1526 days ago
I meant to say "unikernel." Don't know where that brain fart came from!

> Google, however, does not control what runs on servers, and server hardware manufacturers know that if they don’t have a driver in Linux, they won’t sell very much of their hardware, since existing hardware run Linux-based systems.

I'm not sure if "It's the way things are" is quite the argument its made out to be. Some server hardware is beginning to look more and more like a phone/Chromebook. And things do change. "Not in a million years" was the argument made against Linux compared to the traditional enterprise UNIX vendors and where are they now?

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