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Fuchsia, a new operating system

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Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#41

Post by xlayn »

aiyodev wrote: post #34
fixmycode wrote: post #14

I remember a post earlier today about how open source projects needed better marketing. prime example. I had to dive in to know what was the project all about...

The problem isn't marketing. It's culture. While there are many benefits to free and open source software it encourages a take-it-or-leave-it attitude where software is released that's user unfriendly, full of bugs, and has little to no documentation. If someone dare ask about a problem they are having, often the closest thing to help they receive is "Why didn't you just use [esoteric Linux command]? Are you an idiot…

It depends on the forum/group.

For example I've been a more active member on XDA for Cyanogen mod and I did a rude comment; I got my attention immediately called and the maintainer respond the question, same goes for HN.

OTOH... the Linux kernel group it's probably a "little bit" tougher....

Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#44

Post by jdoliner »

aiyodev wrote: post #34
fixmycode wrote: post #14

I remember a post earlier today about how open source projects needed better marketing. prime example. I had to dive in to know what was the project all about...

The problem isn't marketing. It's culture. While there are many benefits to free and open source software it encourages a take-it-or-leave-it attitude where software is released that's user unfriendly, full of bugs, and has little to no documentation. If someone dare ask about a problem they are having, often the closest thing to help they receive is "Why didn't you just use [esoteric Linux command]? Are you an idiot…

Maybe the cultural problem is actually that people like you expect open source projects to be like companies except that you don't have to give them money? Most open source code is written by someone because they want it and then they release it so others can see the code. Of course there's a take-it-or-leave-it attitude... why would they care if you take it? They don't get anything if you take it, you taking it was never their goal. You're just some entitled guy on the internet who decided he wanted to use the software, had a problem and now thinks the developer should do some free work for him.

Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#45

Post by Larrikin »

jdoliner wrote: post #44
aiyodev wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't marketing. It's culture. While there are many benefits to free and open source software it encourages a take-it-or-leave-it attitude where software is released that's user unfriendly, full of bugs, and has little to no documentation. If someone dare ask about a problem they are having, often the closest thing to help they receive is "Why didn't you just use [esoteric Linux command]? Are you an idiot…

Maybe the cultural problem is actually that people like you expect open source projects to be like companies except that you don't have to give them money? Most open source code is written by someone because they want it and then they release it so others can see the code. Of course there's a take-it-or-leave-it attitude... why would they care if you take it? They don't get anything if you take it, you taking it was…

Maybe with a little help understanding it, more people would be able to contribute more back.

Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#46

Post by calinet6 »

jdoliner wrote: post #44
aiyodev wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't marketing. It's culture. While there are many benefits to free and open source software it encourages a take-it-or-leave-it attitude where software is released that's user unfriendly, full of bugs, and has little to no documentation. If someone dare ask about a problem they are having, often the closest thing to help they receive is "Why didn't you just use [esoteric Linux command]? Are you an idiot…

Maybe the cultural problem is actually that people like you expect open source projects to be like companies except that you don't have to give them money? Most open source code is written by someone because they want it and then they release it so others can see the code. Of course there's a take-it-or-leave-it attitude... why would they care if you take it? They don't get anything if you take it, you taking it was…

There's a problem somewhere in the system of open source and the people who use it, and everyone above me provided many examples of dysfunction.

It's dysfunction of a system with a very unclear reward framework, primarily centered around curiosity, pride, and drive. Developers want to build something they consider good; often they want to build something that others will find good and use, and there's intrinsic value and joy in that for them: not all developers are selfish, many do it for others. Users find their creation fascinating and good, if not better than anything out there; users who are programmers both demand more goodness and contribute of their own accord, making a kind of trade in kind. Users who are not programmers or not skilled enough (by no fault of their own) are using it out of necessity or because it is good, but due to the disconnects in the method of creation, it's not inherently good in ways that users expect, and it could be seen as helpful or at least informative to give the creators an idea of how this pridefully created thing could be made better and help more people. This is natural. No one owes anyone anything; this is all just unavoidable human behavior and psychology.

It is not a particular group or person's fault that this convoluted system is not effective. But the wise will look beyond the individual needs and wants of the actors and help find ways to improve how the Open Source paradigm—the system itself—can be improved.

Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#47

Post by pavlov »

The repo at https://fuchsia.googlesource.com reveals a rather interesting UI story for this new operating system.

It seems like the intention is to use Flutter [1] as the UI layer. Flutter uses the Dart language, so there's a Dart environment included in Fuchsia too [2].

For rendering, Fuchsia includes a project called Escher [3] which is described as a physically based renderer that supports soft shadows, light diffusion and other advanced effects. Looking at the source code, Escher is designed to use either OpenGL or Vulkan as the underlying graphics API. (There's an iOS example project included in Escher's source tree. Would be interesting to build that.)

It's not immediately obvious why a lightweight operating system would need a renderer that can do realtime soft shadows and light effects...! But I think the idea here is to build an UI layer that's designed from scratch for Google's Material design language. Shadows and subtle color reflections are a major part of that "layered paper" aesthetic.

So, the stack seems to be: Dart is the language for GUI apps, Flutter provides the widgets, and Escher renders the layers.

The underlying application framework is called Mojo [4]. It already offers bindings for Go, Java, JavaScript, Python and Rust in addition to Dart, but maybe those languages are meant for services rather than GUI apps. (At least I can't see an easy way to create Flutter widgets from something like Rust without loading the Dart VM.)

[1] https://flutter.io

[2] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/dart_content_handler/

[3] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/escher/

[4] https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/mojo/

Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#48

Post by oshepherd »

colemickens wrote: post #30

Written in C. What a shame. edit: Thank you to all of the repliers, I had no idea that most OSes were written in C. Er, actually, I'm more than well aware of that fact and I'm familiar with the number of CVEs that have occurred over the years because of the lack of memory safety involved in that C code. Sorry, I simply don't get the appeal of writing more operating systems and network-exposed code that isn't written…

I love Rust immensely, and it is perhaps my favorite programming language as of late.

However.

This is a microkernel. There is very, very little code inside a microkernel which, if written in Rust, would not end up inside an unsafe block. You are building the safe abstractions here; that code is inherently unsafe.

You could use Rust as a C replacement, but it is a worse C than C, and unsafe rust contains more perils (i.e. UB) than C.

Re: Fuchsia, a new operating system

#50

Post by jdoliner »

calinet6 wrote: post #46
jdoliner wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the cultural problem is actually that people like you expect open source projects to be like companies except that you don't have to give them money? Most open source code is written by someone because they want it and then they release it so others can see the code. Of course there's a take-it-or-leave-it attitude... why would they care if you take it? They don't get anything if you take it, you taking it was…

There's a problem somewhere in the system of open source and the people who use it, and everyone above me provided many examples of dysfunction. It's dysfunction of a system with a very unclear reward framework, primarily centered around curiosity, pride, and drive. Developers want to build something they consider good; often they want to build something that others will find good and use, and there's intrinsic value…

Admittedly my response is another extreme from the parent comment. I run an open-source project and certainly don't have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward it. Although I also run a company behind that project and do get paid for some small subset of the work I do on the project; it'd be a lot harder to maintain that attitude if I didn't. I don't think open-source is perfect, it could be better and in my opinion is constantly improving. I disagree quite a bit with your characterization here though.

You talk about there being a problem somewhere in open source and how it's not any particular persons fault that this convoluted system is not effective... what on earth is your definition of "effective" that it's failing to meet? You mention how "Users find their creation fascinating and good, if not better than anything out there" that sounds pretty effective to me. Consider some concrete examples here:

- Linux, cornerstone of the web used by millions would have cost several billion dollars to build in a non open-source way. - Android, used on millions of phones because it's open source and others can modify it. - Chrome and firefox - Every programming language

Believe it or not these projects didn't succeed despite the fact that they're open-source, they succeed very much because of it. So yeah, let's all grab the dick to the left and pretend that open-source is some broken paradigm that doesn't produce results because some new project doesn't have nice enough documentation.

> Users who are not programmers or not skilled enough (by no fault of their own) are using it out of necessity or because it is good, but due to the disconnects in the method of creation, it's not inherently good in ways that users expect

Some projects will care about these types of users, many won't. That's just the reality of software and there's no obligation to include everyone. Talk to an illiterate person and they'll tell you all about how ineffective the publishing industry is. That doesn't mean publishing should change.

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