Fuchsia — a next-gen OS from Google!

Pink plus Purple is Fuchsia. Thats the very basic literary definition. Technically it’s an operating system by Google.

Google wants Fuchsia to be the ultimate Google OS, running on all of its phones, tablets, laptops and smart home devices

Fuchsia is not a microkernel. Also Fuchsia is not based on Linux and has its own kernel, Zircon, which evolved from LittleKernel. Instead of aiming for minimality, the system architecture is guided by practical concerns about security, privacy, and performance. Thus Fuchsia has a pragmatic, message-passing kernel.

Fuchsia uses BSD/MIT-style open source licenses and has a well inclusive community that welcomes high-quality, well-tested contributions from almost everyone.

Security with Privacy

The basic building blocks of Fuchsia, the kernel primitives, are exposed to applications as object-capabilities, which means that applications running on Fuchsia have no complete authority. The applications can interact only with the objects to which they have been granted access explicitly.

Everything is sandboxed and the software is delivered in hermetic packages. This means all software that runs on the system, including applications and system components, receives the least privilege it needs to perform its job and gains access only to the information it needs to know.

Modern

Fuchsia works by combining components delivered in packages. Fuchsia packages are designed to be updated independently or even delivered temporarily, which means packages are designed to come and go from the device as needed and the software is always up-to-date, like a Web page.

Fuchsia aims to support drivers with a binary-stable interface so that drivers compiled for one version of Fuchsia will continue to work in future versions of Fuchsia without needing to be modified or even recompiled. This approach allows Fuchsia devices to be able to update to newer versions of Fuchsia seamlessly while keeping their existing drivers.

Agnostic Design

Fuchsia currently supports a variety of languages and runtimes, including C++, Rust, Flutter, and Web. Fuchsia is designed to let developers bring their own runtime, which allows a developer to use a variety of languages or runtimes without needing to change Fuchsia itself.

Applications interact with each other and the system using message passing, which means any application that can format messages appropriately can participate fully in the system regardless of its language or runtime. Much like the Internet, Fuchsia is defined by open protocols rather than a particular client or server implementation.

Performance Driven

Fuchsia is based on an asynchronous model that reduces latency by letting the sender proceed without waiting for the receiver. It also optimises memory use by avoiding garbage collection in the core operating system. This in turn helps to minimise memory requirements to achieve equivalent performance.

Support

Currently Fuchsia is supported only in a couple of devices like Acer Switch 12, Intel NUC, or Google Pixelbook. This also is currently only available by building it yourself after following the development guides.

Google Fuchsia allows to do whatever you want from whatever device you have at hand. Also Fuchsia has a developer experience SDK tool which lets developers write software for Fuchsia.

Conclusion

Fuchsia is not tied to a specific end-user experience. Fuchsia is loaded with Google’s Material design found across its Android and Chrome OS products. Shadows are a big part of the whole design aesthetic. The result is an interface with more depth to its appearance unlike other conventional flat OS products.

Fuchsia is trying what Microsoft and Apple already have done in Windows 10 and iOS-to-macOS Sierra Continuity respectively, but in its own way.

Guess what! Fuchsia is Google’s ultimate answer to Microsoft and Apple’s common platforms. Let’s wait and watch, how it plays out.

Exciting times ahead!!!