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Of course it is. It’s not a good thing - it’s essentially killed any possibility of a capability-oriented desktop OS for a number of years, for a start. But it’

Of course it is. It’s not a good thing - it’s essentially killed any possibility of a capability-oriented desktop OS for a number of years, for a start. But it’s the state of things - if someone can’t run at least most of their software on a new system, it’s a massive barrier to adoption. The reason Android and iOS got away with it was that nobody was really running important software on their phones in the first place, so it was a brand new capability that didn’t need to be compatible with anything.

pjmlp 8y ago
Symbian and J2ME phones were quite popular in Europe and Asia, lacking POSIX compatibility wasn't an issue. In fact, the PIPS library for Symbian was only introduced after the decision to buy Qt. You also forgot about ChromeOS, which I bet hardly anyone on the US school system cares about POSIX. Or the webOS running on LG televisions nowadays. FreeRTOS, mbed and IncludeOS aren't POSIX as well. Regarding Fuchsia, there is already support for ISO C, ISO C++, Rust, Go, Dart/Flutter, with Java/Android on the horizon. So I doubt Fuchsia will miss POSIX that much.
- vertex-four 8y ago
  My experience of J2ME phones (as someone living in India pre-iPhone) was that the Java functionality went unused, except as far as it was used to implement vendor-written apps. ChromeOS benefits from the fact that it is just a web browser - if you want just a web browser rather than a generic operating system, Fuschia is of course unnecessary. Nobody targets webOS, and I suspect people’s choice of TV has more to do with how it looks on the in-store display or how cheap it is than what apps you can run on it. FreeRTOS, mbed and IncludeOS are not generic operating systems in the first place. There are essentially no “pure” ISO C or ISO C++ programs - everybody uses system-specific libraries at some level. Basically, Fuschia suffers from the fact that a large amount of userland will need to be rewritten for it, depending on what market segment it targets. (“Just” being an alternate Android runtime for phones, as an example, wouldn’t require this.) This is an obstacle - not an insurmountable one, but being non-POSIX is an obstacle for any OS, that the people behind it need a strategy to tackle. Whether or not people will code apps for Fuschia will depend on how excited developers get about it at first, and then how many people use it.

pjmlp 8y ago

Symbian and J2ME phones were quite popular in Europe and Asia, lacking POSIX compatibility wasn't an issue. In fact, the PIPS library for Symbian was only introduced after the decision to buy Qt. You also forgot about ChromeOS, which I bet hardly anyone on the US school system cares about POSIX. Or the webOS running on LG televisions nowadays. FreeRTOS, mbed and IncludeOS aren't POSIX as well. Regarding Fuchsia, there is already support for ISO C, ISO C++, Rust, Go, Dart/Flutter, with Java/Android on the horizon. So I doubt Fuchsia will miss POSIX that much.

vertex-four 8y ago
My experience of J2ME phones (as someone living in India pre-iPhone) was that the Java functionality went unused, except as far as it was used to implement vendor-written apps. ChromeOS benefits from the fact that it is just a web browser - if you want just a web browser rather than a generic operating system, Fuschia is of course unnecessary. Nobody targets webOS, and I suspect people’s choice of TV has more to do with how it looks on the in-store display or how cheap it is than what apps you can run on it. FreeRTOS, mbed and IncludeOS are not generic operating systems in the first place. There are essentially no “pure” ISO C or ISO C++ programs - everybody uses system-specific libraries at some level. Basically, Fuschia suffers from the fact that a large amount of userland will need to be rewritten for it, depending on what market segment it targets. (“Just” being an alternate Android runtime for phones, as an example, wouldn’t require this.) This is an obstacle - not an insurmountable one, but being non-POSIX is an obstacle for any OS, that the people behind it need a strategy to tackle. Whether or not people will code apps for Fuschia will depend on how excited developers get about it at first, and then how many people use it.