Today, I was surprised to see that The Fuchsia system is about to enter dogfood testing, where developers have already started to test the system themselves. This is good news for the Developers of Flutter.

Fuchsia is Google’s third operating system, after Android and ChromeOS. Fuchsia was first mentioned in 2016. Since then, it has been revealed that Fuchsia is planned to run on smartphones, smart furniture, computers and other devices. The most likely adopters of Fuchsia OS are smart embedded devices.

At present, Android is relatively stable on the mobile phone platform, and it is relatively low risk to start testing through smart devices related to the Internet of things, such as smart audio and TV.

Fuchsia is unique in that it is not a “Linux” related system. Instead, it uses Zircon, a new microkernel developed by Google itself, and uses Dart and Flutter as the language and framework for interface development.

Linux has nothing to do

Before Fuchsia, Google didn’t have full control over its operating system. Fuchsia got rid of Linux, so it got rid of the GPL. Fuchsia’s Zircon kernel uses a hybrid open source protocol (BSD 3 clause/MIT/Apache 2.0), and this option clearly gives Google more control over the system.

Since Linux is under the GPL open source license, any code that involves Linux also needs to be open sourced, so Android had to use HAL intermediate layers to protect the “interests” of major vendors.

In fact, the current Android on non-phone smart devices does not meet Google’s expectations in the future, and the relatively “light” and free Fuchsia is Google’s new target, after all, Android and ChromeOS are the underlying Linux. Linux is out of Google’s control.

Flutter

Yes, Dart and Flutter are two things you have to say about Fuchsia. Many developers may not know Fuchsia, but they have heard of Dart and Flutter.

Flutter is a cross-platform UI framework launched by Google. In 2019, Flutter has become a “upstart” in cross-platform development. The Flutter framework currently supports Android, iOS, Web, MacOS and other platforms. Therefore, it can be seen that Google’s deployment of Fuchsia is quite strategic. The layout of Flutter reflects that Google hopes to unify the performance of the whole ecosystem through Fuchsia OS.

Why is Fuchsia’s deployment strategic? Just as WinPhone was actually quite good, but it gradually lost in the competition with Android and iOS, one of the biggest external reasons is: ecology.

So this time, Before Fuchsia had even matured, Google trained a community of application developers through the Flutter framework and provided a range of third-party support through the Pub plugin platform.

While we can’t say that Google will fully promote Fuchsia, we can say that the future of Fuchsia is “step by step”. For example, developers who have access to Flutter (Android/iOS/Web) can easily become Fuchsia developers when they need to. Existing applications or functions can be quickly migrated to Fuchsia, which has potential ecological value.

Just as many Java developers were able to move to Android, the current Flutter developers are the Fuchsia developers of the future.

Midori was Microsoft’s first attempt at an operating system, but was dropped in the face of unacceptable costs associated with porting Windows functionality. So ecology and cost are the building blocks of a new system.

In addition, Fuchsia is completely free of JVM and JAVA development, which has the following benefits: The Dart language is Google’s own language, which allows Flutter to modify the Dart VIRTUAL machine without fear of being “sued”. Dart also allows Flutter to use Dart without being “in love” with Oracle.

Finally, it can be seen that the Fuchsia Language strategy is shown in the figure below. The FIDL that we are not familiar with is actually: Fuchsia Interface Definition Language is the IPC system for Fuchsia; C and C++ are perennial must-haves; Dart can also be seen as an important part of Flutter.

Fuchsia’s future is uncertain, but at least its current status looks good. Whether Fuchsia can achieve the same success as Android in China is questionable, but it’s good to keep an eye on it. After all, it’s open source.

  • Fuchsia OS 中文 版 : fuchsia-china.com/
  • Fuchsia official address: fuchsia.dev