WHAT IS GOOGLE FUCHSIA?
Fuchsia is an open-source capability-based operating system developed by Google. It first became known to the public when the project appeared on a self-hosted form of git in August 2016 without any official announcement. The name means "Pink + Purple = Fuchsia (a new Operating System)", which is a reference to Pink (Apple's first effort at an object-oriented, microkernel-based operating system) and Purple (the original iPhone's codename). In contrast to prior Google-developed operating systems such as Chrome OS and Android, which are based on the Linux kernel, Fuchsia is based on a new kernel called Zircon. After years of development, Fuchsia was officially released to the public on the first-generation Google Nest Hub, replacing its original Cast OS.
WHEN HAS IT EMERGED?
In August 2016, media outlets reported on a codebase post published on GitHub, revealing that Google was developing a new operating system called "Fuchsia". No official announcement was made, but inspection of the code suggested its capability to run on universal devices, including "dash infotainment systems for cars, to embedded devices like traffic lights and digital watches, all the way up to smartphones, tablets and PCs". The code differs from Android and Chrome OS due to its being based on the Zircon kernel (formerly called Magenta) rather than on the kernel. In May 2017, Ars Technica wrote about Fuchsia's new user interface, an upgrade from its command-line interface at its first reveal in August, along with a developer writing that Fuchsia "isn't a toy thing, it's not a 20% Project, it's not a dumping ground of a dead thing that we don't care about anymore". Multiple media outlets wrote about the project's seemingly close ties to Android, with some speculating that Fuchsia might be an effort to "re-do" or replace Android in a way that fixes problems on that platform. In January 2018, Google published a guide on how to run Fuchsia on Pixelbooks. This was followed successfully by Ars Technica. A Fuchsia "device" was added to the Android ecosystem in January 2019 via the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Google talked about Fuchsia at Google I/O 2019. Hiroshi Lockheimer, Senior Vice President of Chrome and Android, described Fuchsia as one of Google’s experiments around new concepts for operating systems.
On July 1, 2019, Google announced the official website of the development project providing source code and documentation for the operating system. Roughly a year and a half later, on December 8, 2020, Google announced that they were "expanding Fuchsia's open-source model" including making mailing lists public, introducing a governance model, publishing a roadmap and would be using a public issue tracker.
In May 2021, Google employees confirmed that it had deployed Fuchsia in the consumer market for the first time, within a software update to the first-generation Google Home Hub that replaces its existing Chromecast-based software. The update contains no user-facing changes to the device's software or user interface.
Fuchsia's user interface and apps are written with Flutter, a software development kit allowing cross-platform development abilities for Fuchsia, Android and iOS. Flutter produces apps based on Dart, offering apps with high performance that run at 120 frames per second.
Fuchsia also offers a Vulkan-based graphics rendering engine called Escher, with specific support for "Volumetric soft shadows", an element that Ars Technica wrote, "seems custom-built to run Google's shadow-heavy 'Material Design' interface guidelines”. Due to the Flutter software development kit offering cross-platform opportunities, users are able to install parts of Fuchsia on Android devices. Fuchsia is based on a new messaging-passing kernel called Zircon, named after the mineral. It is heavily inspired by Unix kernels but differs greatly.
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