I find that writing which speaks of Google as a single "it" misses the mark. I say this because the Googlers who write here show many disparate views and pressures to deliverable.
Sure, we think "there is one vision" but I suspect, there will be people inside the tent who still think this is a good idea, or a variation of it, and so (not) is mostly conjectural, because nobody who CAN say with authority what is or is not being done, is going to want to commit until they understand how it affects their KPIs.
Considering why Google acquired Android in the first place, Some of this is a bit bizarre. You would think by now, there was a roadmap which made sense across the generations. We're at Android 15. Thats an awful lot of time in that model of the world and Fuschia is on what release trajectory?
I find that writing which speaks of Google as a single "it" misses the mark. I say this because the Googlers who write here show many disparate views and pressures to deliverable.
That doesn't matter if you're talking about a boolean outcome or the actions of the company as a whole. There could be 50%+1 person on one side of the internal debate and 50%-1 person on the other, and everyone outside of the company would still say "Google" to refer to the collective outcomes and actions of everyone there. The subtleties of what happens behind closed doors doesn't matter.
Individually Googlers are a disparate bunch. Collectively, they are "Google".
It might explain an apparently erratic behaviour. Continuously alternating priorities, indecision, that sort of thing. Multiple actions, some aligned with "still promoting Fuchsia", others with "we're abandoning it".
The "Stadia isn't going anywhere" announcement weeks before killing it comes to mind.
This is the case for every company, not just Google. I've been the one internally trying to stop us from making a bad decision which ended up being made anyway. I can't distance myself from that. For everybody outside, there's only the company. My dissent as an individual doesn't exist out there.
There's a pattern here of not invented here and Google forever obsessing about injecting their own versions of things. Android brought in a lot of technology not controlled by Google. Java, mobile Linux, stuff like that. It rejected Java for systems programming and came up with Go. And of course with Go they built their own compiler instead of building on the llvm ecosystem as well (unlike what Apple did with Swift).
It also rejected Java for frontend programming on the web, and Dart became a thing. Which eventually got repurposed for Flutter so they could get rid of Java on Android too. Early on, it started funding Firefox. But then it partnered with Apple on Webkit only to fork that into Chrome. And of course they then came up with Chrome OS (a linux based OS running their own browser. With Fuchsia the goal was to replace Linux and have a whole Google only stack and replace both Chrome OS and Android.
One thing that keeps on happening to Google is outside innovation making their internal efforts redundant. And because Google is so big, it usually doesn't take long for external stuff to start getting used internally and become more or less strategic. Dart/flutter solved a problem. But they never really got rid of Java. And then Kotlin came along and largely replaced Java on Android largely removing the need for Flutter. Flutter is not dead. But at this point it's also clearly not replacing Kotlin.
And Google's own Jetpack Compose was built on top of Kotlin in parallel to Flutter. Jetbrain's multiplatform version of that, which is now targeting everything that Flutter was targeting (IOS, Web, Desktop, Android), is starting to look pretty solid. Google just endorsed kotlin multiplatform at Google IO as well.
And you'd be wrong to dismiss Kotlin as a frontend only thing because at this point Amazon, Facebook, Google and most other big Java server side users are also deploying Kotlin for that at scale. These companies have many millions of lines of code of Java of course and that's not disappearing overnight. But they are increasingly treating that as legacy code and transitioning to Kotlin for new projects.
On the system programming side, Go has worked really well and it's pretty popular. But it did not really displace Java/Kotlin even inside Google. And now we have Rust popping up everywhere as a better C++. Including places like the Linux kernel. Rust is popular especially for things that need to be fast and secure. So, Go is kind of sandwiched between those ecosystems now.
The pattern here is Google having the right analysis about what needs doing, work on some internal solution, only to then have external solutions popping up that that remove the need for Google's in house thing.
This latest effort to reinvent sandboxing and salvaging some bits of Fuchsia needs to be looked at in the broader trend of people using WASM for that; especially server side. But of course WASM runs great in Chrome too. And thus on Android/Linux.
people write silly comments like this all the time.
Google and Googlers makes lot of dumb choices all the time, but comments like this always miss the mark.
> Google forever obsessing about injecting their own versions of things.
many things Google did their own version of is because it didn't really exist anywhere else. some examples:
- mapreduce
- flume
- bigtable
- spanner, both the mad original one and the new one
- borg
- fairly secure containerisation
- industrial scale monitoring
- industrial scale logs processing
- industrial scale static analysis for shitty languages like Java and C++
- industrial scale profiling
all of this things were printing money inside Google for many many years before anything equivalent existed outside.
etc
> It rejected Java for systems programming and came up with Go
no, no one uses Java for "systems programming", and Go was some extremely senior engineers deciding to invent a new language/toolchain because they hated writing C++.
> with Go they built their own compiler instead of building on the llvm ecosystem as well (unlike what Apple did with Swift).
who was using LLVM for new, light, fast-compiling languages in 2006?
> It also rejected Java for frontend programming on the web
everybody, at every company in the entire world, including Sun, rejected Java for frontend web programming.
> , and Dart became a thing. Which eventually got repurposed for Flutter so they could get rid of Java on Android too.
that's obviously untrue?
> Early on, it started funding Firefox. But then it partnered with Apple on Webkit only to fork that into Chrome.
it's an advertising company worth a trillion dollars, "ensure web browsers work well on multiple platforms so our ads can be shown" seems like a pretty obviously correct business choice.
> And of course they then came up with Chrome OS (a linux based OS running their own browser.
unsurprisingly, as web browsers became more functional and humans wanted to maintain PCs less, systems like this and iPadOS came to into their own.
> With Fuchsia the goal was to replace Linux and have a whole Google only stack and replace both Chrome OS and Android.
fuschia is/was a project to get a modern security model and to escape from the nightmare of SoC vendors never ever ever ever caring about drivers.
> One thing that keeps on happening to Google is outside innovation making their internal efforts redundant.
for sure things outside later appear. that doesn't mean that Google was wrong to spend person centuries on their internal thing, if they got > person centuries of value in the meantime. it also doesn't mean that just because for example they're both called "distributed KV stores" that migrating from BigTable to HBase would be a good idea. obviously sometimes Google should move to a more successful external thing, but the costs of doing so for anything that was successful internally are comically high.
> And because Google is so big, it usually doesn't take long for external stuff to start getting used internally and become more or less strategic. Dart/flutter solved a problem. But they never really got rid of Java. And then Kotlin came along and largely replaced Java on Android largely removing the need for Flutter. Flutter is not dead. But at this point it's also clearly not replacing Kotlin.
because Google is so big and historically wealthy, it quite deliberately willing to try four vaguely similar things and see if any of them work out. that was not seen as a mistake.
> On the system programming side, Go has worked really well and it's pretty popular. But it did not really displace Java/Kotlin even inside Google.
no one ever intended Go to replace Java or Kotlin - obviously? Java is a higher level and more annoying language, and Kotlin didn't exist at all until 4 years after Go was started. even the creators of Go didn't intend to replace Java, they wanted to write less C++.
> And now we have Rust popping up everywhere as a better C++. Including places like the Linux kernel. Rust is popular especially for things that need to be fast and secure. So, Go is kind of sandwiched between those ecosystems now.
ok? it's great that Rust is doing well. what does that have to do with anything else? Go started in 2007, should no one have invented non-runtime-based languages in 2007 because Graydon had stopped working on Monotone and started writing a toy language in OCaml in 2006? or that Google should stop funding Go now? why would it stop spending a tiny amount of money to sustain a pretty useful (and also quite shitty in some ways) language? it has millions of LOC of Go code internally now, too. telling Go developers they'll only be writing Rust now isn't a way to get more Rust developers, it's a way to get resignations.
Go also avoided one of the other traps Google usually fell in to when solving problems it had and others didn't - opensourcing it instead of just writing a paper and then letting some Apache project take all the mindshare.
> The pattern here is Google having the right analysis about what needs doing, work on some internal solution, only to then have external solutions popping up that that remove the need for Google's in house thing.
lol. I assume you've looked closely at how Go and Rust work in google3? and the different problems they are used to solve, and then determined that the cost of re-writing all in Rust and re-training everyone and re-writing all tooling is worthwhile? that's a fascinating claim.
I think fundamentally, people just like making dumb assertions about big companies that seem - and are - dumb, like Google. all of the above is public domain knowledge that you could have looked up instead of writing 250 words. you got lots of facts wrong, you don't seem to appreciate that big organisations inherently - and deliberately - try multiple things that you feel overlap, you seem to not understand how cost/benfit and RoI work, etc.
just...why? there's so much to criticise Google for, I don't get why people bother to do it but put so little effort in to it.
Sure, we think "there is one vision" but I suspect, there will be people inside the tent who still think this is a good idea, or a variation of it, and so (not) is mostly conjectural, because nobody who CAN say with authority what is or is not being done, is going to want to commit until they understand how it affects their KPIs.
Considering why Google acquired Android in the first place, Some of this is a bit bizarre. You would think by now, there was a roadmap which made sense across the generations. We're at Android 15. Thats an awful lot of time in that model of the world and Fuschia is on what release trajectory?