It seems Google is putting the building blocks together for their next operating system. Fuchsia looks like a potential candidate for replacing both Android and Chrome OS eventually – kind of like how Microsoft envisaged Windows 10 as a one-size-fits-all platform. And one of the pieces that will determine how successful Fuchsia becomes is developer support. When Chris Lattner left Apple to join Google he brought with him the expertise he used to develop the Swift programming language. And now, Swift is being used to develop software on Fuchsia.
Lattner tweeted that Google has created a “staging area” for Swift so they can contribute to the public Swift code repository.
Swift at Google has enough folks working on it that we need a staging ground/integration point, and we decided it should be public. https://t.co/hyphe0KrU0
— Chris Lattner (@clattner_llvm) November 15, 2017
And while iOS applications that require access to proprietary parts of Apple’s software won’t run natively on Fuchsia, we are looking at a potential future when a developer could create all their program logic in Swift and then create UIs for different platforms.
Google has published a small “Hello World” app that is built in Swift but runs on Fuchsia as a proof of concept.
This is good news for developers as the job of porting applications so that they are multi-platform is simplified. A layered approach, where the program logic and user interface are separated will make multi-platform software creation easier although functions requiring access to locked down elements of different operating platforms will need to be developed separately.
Are you a developer interested in this? What possibilities does this open up?
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