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by alex-mohr 470 days ago
As far as I could tell, its main goal was to have fun writing an OS. At that, it seems to have succeeded for a number of the people involved?

In terms of impact or business case, I'm missing what the end goal for the company or execs involved is. It's not re-writing user-space components of AOSP, because that's all Java or Kotlin. Maybe it's a super-longterm super-expensive effort to replace Linux underlying Android with Fuchia? Or for ChromeOS? Again, seems like a weird motivation to justify such a huge investment in both the team building it and a later migration effort to use it. But what else?
1 comments
dekhn 470 days ago
When I worked at $GOOG my manager left the team to work on Fuchsia and he described it as a "senior engineer retention project", but also the idea was to come up with a kernel that had a stable interface so that vendors could update their hardware more easily compared to linux.

Many things that google did when I was there was simply to have a hedge, if the time/opportunity arose, against other technologies. For example they kept trying to pitch non-Intel hardware, at least partly so they could have more negotiation leverage over Intel. It's amazing how much wasted effort they have created following bad ideas.

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cmrdporcupine 470 days ago
The problem with Fuchsia is it went from that to "We're taking all your headcount and rewriting your entire project on Fuchsia" and then started making deadline promises to upper management that it couldn't fulfill.

They seemed to have unlimited headcount to go rewrite the entire world to put on display assistant devices that had already shipped and succeeded with an existing software stack that Google then refused to evolve or maintain.

Fuchsia itself and the people who started it? Pretty nifty and smart. Fuchsia the project inside Google? Fuck.

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andrekandre 470 days ago 

  > the idea was to come up with a kernel that had a stable interface so that vendors could update their hardware more easily
interesting... if that was a big goal, i wonder why they didn't go with some kind of adapter/meta-driver (and just maintain that) to the kernel that has a stable interface.

maybe long-term not viable i guess...?

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