Only Google changes rules of the game on developer. They do not realize that they are make •a platform•, not a product. Stable, comfortable platform that software runs on. I honestly don't give two cents about all their struggles to make "a better OS". OS is to launch apps, and making those apps is a miserable experience, where I have full time people just to keep up with Google 'improvements'. Somehow every other platform is fine. I hardly had to change code written 10 years ago for iOS, for consoles or Windows - not at all! But Google keeps making their own special PhD driven darlings.
> We're planning to implement a new more powerful network request interception API in a future version, which will be available to L+ devices with a recent enough WebView via AndroidX. Being able to read POST bodies is one of the features we're intending to include. Unfortunately we can't share schedule information about when this may be available, but we are aware of this use case and intend to support it.
Instead of fixing bugs and making incremental improvements, they seem to have a strong propensity for grand rewrites.
I got tired of the constant parade of new Google APIs, libraries, and technologies years ago and have been choosing alternative products whenever possible.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170125134508/http://sleepmode....
I'm really sorry that you have this feeling, but this has nothing to do with PhDs. It's impossible to get promoted by bug fixes inside Google, and people are promotion driven.
There were many people who tried hard to fix a lot of bugs, but they usually burn out due to lack of recognition inside Google.
Maybe it's working for them from a bottom-line perspective, but it's made their brand as an engineering company clownish.
I think Google is too big at this point already, but that's an orthogonal question.
Again, though, may not make sense for them from a $$$ perspective. Jank and rough edges galore may be something they're willing to live with.
[EDIT]
How this works in my head:
Manager: Could you take a look at the Android developer documentation? Some of it's badly outdated and have you actually tried using it? A lot of the advice is... kinda bad. Also maybe look at a few of these UI components we had the Summer interns make, they've got bizarre implementations and are difficult and inconsistent to customize. Oh and god have you looked at our issue tracker? Has anyone, actually? Like, ever?
Developer: Hey so have you heard of this place called Amazon?
Manager: Uh I mean how about we start a fourth greenfield instant messaging product instead?
Developer: That's better. Amazon? Who's Amazon?
And all of this isn't only motivated by "not doing boring tasks", but also because this is what drives promotions / career advancement. So "launch a feature/project, get rewarded, and switch team" seems like a trend, and it does not encourage to think about long term maintenance / etc. (It isn't a generality either, but it is a bit of a trend)
Working on improving the quality of the software is not always easy to measure in terms of impact, and hard to get recognition for in the same as shipping a new feature.
Where Google differs, maybe, is that its promotion system is well codified and rewards the "difficulty" of the deliverable. This is skewing the balance to reward adding more complexity in the system for the sake of solving it (you create difficult problems artificially, they aren't intrinsic to the nature of the user needs you should solve).
There are teams whose only role is to work down those tickets, one after the other.
This is why people job-hop for meaningful career advancement. Much easier than dealing w/ the broken promotions processes these companies employ.
On the flip side, my first programs that I wrote for myself in the 90's still run. Yeah, I know that DOS is emulated now, but MS made them still work, and I didn't even have to re-compile.
I have this conspiracy theory that Google is purposefully trying to make things difficult to get rid of developers that don't have a lot of resources.
I think Hanlon’s Razor applies -- this isn’t intentional, it’s just unfortunate mistakes.
I think the main driving factors are:
- Many Android APIs were badly designed from the start;
- Android was not designed for easy OS updates, so many users have old OSes;
- Google like Apple’s approach of aggressively deprecating old APIs, and try to do the same. But unlike Apple, they still have to deal with old OS versions, and their fundamental OS design is not as sound. The end result is what we see, messy and buggy APIs.
I agree and Apple does this on iOS as well. It's a way of clearing out old apps.
I really find it hard to believe that Android is worse than proprietary, undocumented, Windows-only toolchains of Symbians, Tizens and bunch of other embedded crap, not to mention the horrors of what was PS3 toolchain at the begging.
I think you might be overdramatizing this a bit.
And if you prefer a more modern example, Android is indeed worse to use than UWP or iOS.
When they release stable releases, they are actually betas, and updated documentation is scattered around Medium and G+ posts, alongside Google IO and DevBytes videos, why bother updating the official documentation.
After 10 years, the NDK still feels like a 20% job from a team that is forced to accept that Android should provide a bit more than just 100% Java.
Please no, Symbian C++ was the worst development environment i had the displeasure to touch. I'd rather hand write every Java binding for every single API call manually in NDK than even consider looking at Symbian C++ again.
(relevant experience from Nokia's Series 60 around the time of 6600, i don't know if Symbian improved after that, i lost all will to bother with the platform, but considering you still had to implement exceptions via macros by hand because of technical decisions made two decades earlier, despite the platform not being backwards compatible and thus could fix said decisions, i do not expect that things improved)
Oh, the irony!
Next I tried GKE and it was an absolute joy. I had a simple web app serving traffic an hour in. Probably because unlike Android, they have to make people like GKE to sell it.
Do you think a proprietary Windows C++ compiler for an embedded platform will make your DI uses easier? :)
As a user, I concur with this. I can install Android apps created in 2012 that still work in Android 9.
In iOS, I remember that each major update made half of my apps broken (in some cases, completely broken).
Strangely, the only Android drivers, that can be trivially ported between Android version, are those "unstable" bits in Linux kernel.
Take any postmarket smartphone firmware — if something does not work after porting to new Android version, you can bet, that it is a proprietary userspace blob. Who develops HAL for those blobs? — Google. Who controls it's API? — Google.
What "stability of drivers" are we talking about here? Certainly not the kind, helpful to users.
That's only because the Linux kernel is actively hostile to the idea of maintaining a stable driver interface. Windows 7 drivers from 10 years ago still work in Windows 10.
This is patently, provably FALSE[1]
MS goes out of their way to NOT to break APIs. My ancient ATI netbook can run Windows Vista graphics drivers on Win 10. MS only breaks driver API when massive kernel/underlying APIs demand it. ex. 98->NT, XP->Visa.
Now contrast that with Linux. Linux kernel devs are openly hostile to binary blob drivers so they make no attempt to preserve ABI stability. I've see this happen multiple times with ATI binary drivers in GNU/Linux and when I was running cyanogenmod on my phone.
[1] https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/how-to/windows/how-get-drivers...
And I still can't stop laughing after reading: > Somehow every other platform is fine
To paraphrase JWZ's CADT article linked below "writing thoughtful critique" is not fun, "making useful suggestions to improve something" is not fun but "writing a snarky, resentful rant on HN" is fun.
ps. most developers on Android are not game developers, maybe time to think about seeing the world from other peoples point of view?
> They do not realize that they are make •a platform•, not a product.
Consider: maybe Fuchsia isn't a platform?
ChromeOS certainly isn't a platform: developers don't develop "for ChromeOS." App developers target the WebExtension ABI (or, more recently, the Android ABI), and ChromeOS just runs their apps using mysterious virtualization magic that doesn't matter to the developer. You don't target the OS; you just target a stable ABI. (Other examples of this: the Linux kernel ABI used by Docker on {Linux, macOS, Windows}; the Linux kernel ABI used by Illumos branded zones; the Linux userland ABI used by the Steam Runtime.) Essentially, you can think of ChromeOS not as an OS in the traditional sense, but as a hypervisor. The libs your apps depend on aren't part of the OS; they're part of your ABI's zonal environment, which is stabilized separately from the OS.
I would expect that Fuchsia is doing the same: being an OS but not a platform. The only people who will have to directly target Fuchsia are Google engineers.
*eventually is a big significance here. If I wouldn't have my APIs available on launch of FucOS, or like a clear roadmap to them in half a year, I would have to start my own projects to work around of that "eventually it would work" promise. Because "eventually" is not good enough.
Some people here think your own experience is just an anecdote. They're wrong of course. Ones own experience is a data point (or even a collection of them).
Is that an anecdote or a data point? What if 150 people tell you the same thing? Having done exactly that, I don't really care how anyone else classifies it, it is my reality.
The issue with running OpenGL on top of Vulkan is that Vulkan's API exposes a very rigid and static view of the GPU and OpenGL is the exact opposite, allowing arbitrary state changes at any time. While actual GPUs are not as dynamic as OpenGL, they are also not as static as Vulkan so by implementing it on top of Vulkan you are forcing state changes that would not be necessary for the underlying GPU.
Also OpenGL being a higher level API provides for more opportunities for optimization than Vulkan (a very common example would be display lists which thanks to their immutability and opaqueness can have a large number of optimizations applied to them - something that both Nvidia and AMD takes advantage of, especially Nvidia which performs very aggressive optimizations on them).
Of course, given enough time, faster hardware will solve this.
I contribute to an open source project called Torsocks, which is part of the Tor Project, and this comment really resonated with me. Creating a syscall sandbox that works across even a few, generally similar POSIX-compliant OS's is ridiculous.
FreeBSD and MacOS for example have a very similar system interface. But sandboxing on FreeBSD is via pledge, and MacOS uses the App Sandbox. Linux uses seccomp.
It's a mess.
Vulkan is already going down the same path in spite of its youth.
This is all a good thing.
Ergo middleware is the new cross-platform API.
That option hasn't been taken away from you. And unlike OpenGL, you can't unknowingly be relying on an extension since they're opt-in. So what's the problem again?
Anyway, middleware has won the battle of 3D graphics, what goes on the bottom layer is largely irrelevant to most devs.
I've the feeling that POSIX is an API that makes many assumptions about how things internally are implemented in the kernel. So POSIX as a library is often limited or inefficient.
What they do, more typically, is 'Write Linux software'. If they care about POSIX they will try to ignore features they don't think was mentioned in some POSIX manual from 20 years ago. It's all very hand-wavy.
This is why you see the major operating systems advertise Linux software compatibility rather then paying for POSIX certifications. AIX, Solaris, Windows, etc. Sure it's not a official standard, but it's going to be pretty well defined because you can just model your compatibility on WWLD.
If push comes to shove then Fuchsia could just add some variation of 'usermode linux' as one of those userspace kernel services.
I was learning about kernel dev around the same time as trying to understand how conditional execution and speculative execution worked as a result of really trying to understand every step that happens when a system call hands something to the kernel and the kernel does something with it and hands it back to the system.
I kept asking but alot of supposed linux nerds I spoke with couldn't tell me how the kernel and user space truly handed off data or negociated memory with eachother, leaving me drawing out trap handling routines on a posterboard penciling in gdb dissassembles of memory for system call source code, feeling dumb for not knowing, meanwhile we all find out about Spectre and Meltdown and that really there is not a secure handoff without significant performance degradation and/or increased sandboxing for things like the browser, etc.
And of course what is the root of the issue here? The root of the issue is that linux is too deeply integrated into monopolized hardware architectures, which is perhaps why AMD's stock price skyrocketed the day Spectre and Meltdown came out, when we found out the only mitigation for this legendary security vuln in the near future, will cost a 30% reduction in performance across the board with intel as opposed to much less with AMD given the AMD architecture was less prone to exploiting the vulnerabilties around speculative execution.
The more I learned about these things plus issues with other basic functions like wait() ot strcpy() or in general the lack of protections around C, the more I entertained the idea of looking for alternative operating systems. The networking stack in Fuschia is written in Go for example. While I don't know much about Go, can it be worse than C when it comes leaving it up to almost every developer to take care of their own garbage collection and what the performance and security implications of this are?
Magenta is designed to be modular enough in nature to withstand the waves of hardware architectural evolution coming and given we are approaching 5nm development (the theoretical limit of how small a transistor gate can be before we can no longer control interactions/flipping a transistor switch due to quantum interaction), and this is not far off, Intel already has 10nm in production and probably others now as well (its been a bit since I checked) then to quantum computing:
Because quantum computing (this is debatable and I know the least about this) is not ready for mass production, particularly on the mobile scale, my conjecture is once we reach the theoretical limit of how small a transistor will be, designs will turn to optimizing for performance in every other way we can without relying on powerful processors to accomodate for memory bloat or endless dependencies (yes I also pray this requires javascript modules to be better or die out but thats a long range dream).
Meanwhile AMD gains ground post spectre and meltdown. So, in summary, there are alot of other options to consider than just optimizing for POSIX forever.
Therefore, I am glad there is a push to explore alternatives. I feel as though anyone who thinks it's not potentially beneficial to explore POSIX alternatives based distros does not work with Unix based systems in any kind of depth on a daily basis, but if someone does, and you think Linux for example, is the best operating system in the world and can't be improved upon outside of its defining protocols, then I would love to hear from you on this thread. I am not nearly as experienced as most people who work with Linux, but I can say that most I have interacted with it view it as a love hate relationship for many of these very reasons.
You can also see this trend of unhappiness with Linux OS defaults out in the wild outside of google.
More and More and serious applications are looking to bypass userspace application development to be either more secure, customize, most often for the purpose of if not security, to optimize performance for the things we use to consider the std linux kernel somewhat good at.
Here are few varied examples I can think of off the top of my head anecdotally when trying to solve everyday problems for users with linux, but I am sure there are many more:
1. Dropbox bandaid attempts to customise network schedulers usually handled in kernelspace due to performance issues: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2018/03/meet-bandaid-the-drop...
2. Wiregaurd is an example of a VPN where communication negociation is handled more and more in the kernel, because traditional vpn designs have left TLS handoffs in userspace (what is the point of userspace anymore for serious application development when this is the trending security default): https://www.wireguard.com/
3. Sysdig implements epf functionality to allow for sysadmins and devops engineers to customise and or secure in ways we don't trust or consider the default linux operating systems userspace/kernel space design to do anymore: https://dig.sysdig.com/c/pf-blog-introducing-sysdig-ebpf
Dig into the worlds of Burroughs B5500 (now Unisys ClearPath), IBM OS/360 (now IBM z), IBM OS/400 (now IBM i), and the now gone Mesa/Cedar, Oberon, Active Oberon, SPIN OS, Topaz OS, Mac OS/Lisa, Singularity, Midori, Inferno, ...
Google is not stupid, they are not going to deprecate android overnight and replace it with Fuschia, this operating system has been in the works open source, you can see the commits on github for atleast two years I think more, and there will clearly be many iterations of its development to come with increasing adoption each time as people make money on the platform, just like with Android which took years before it reached the threshold of 50% use compared to iphones and no iphone video games developers that I know of starved to death trying to adapt to this change. The drama on this thread about api changes are significant for sure and I understand Google redacts API's or suddenly starts charging for them in a way that makes small companies close up shop overnight (like google maps for example) but it is not a justification to pretend that objective limitations around Moore's Law and the need for competition in computer hardware is forcing companies who have experience in both spaces to reconsider kernel development at a more fundamental scale.
Still, it will be a scenario similar to ChromeOS. How many people are buying ChromeOS devices to run Android apps?
Burroughs B5500, first OS written in an high level systems language (ESPOL, later NEWP) in 1961, 8 years before C came into existence. Already used compiler instrics instead of Assembly, and the concept of unsafe code blocks.
IBM OS/360, famously introduced the concept of containers, alongside IBM OS/400, also has language environments, think common VM for multiple languages.
IBM OS/400, originally written in a mix of Assembly and PL/S, uses the concept of managed runtime with a kernel JIT called at installation time, and uses a database as filesystem.
Mesa/Cedar, system language developed at Xerox PARC, using the same IDE like experience similar to their Smalltalk and Interlisp-D workstations. Uses reference counting with a cycle collector.
Oberon and its descendants, Niklaus Wirth and his team approach to systems programming at ETHZ, after his 2nd sabaticall year at Xerox PARC.
Mac OS/Lisa, these first versions of Apple OSes were written in Object Pascal, designed in collaboration with Niklaus Wirth, whose extensions were later adopted by Borland for Turbo Pascal 5.5.
Singularity/Midori, the research OSes designed at MSR, largely based on .NET technologies.
Inferno, the actual end of Plan 9, using a managed language for userspace, Limbo.
SPIN OS/Topaz OS - Graphical workstation OSes for distributed computing developed in Modula-3
But it's not. Where is this OpenGL implementation that runs on Vulkan? I would argue that it should come as fully open source from Khronos group since they are the ones providing both standards. It's fine to create a new thing with a long term vision of what a better world looks like. But people won't follow if the pieces they need today are just a wish.
[1]: https://github.com/Think-Silicon/GLOVE [2]: https://github.com/google/angle
- OpenGL should be a library. This is just going to make OpenGL development easier in the long run. Right now there are too many OpenGL implementations and the differences matter. Running one OpenGL library on top of N different Vulkan implementations is miles better than running on top of N different OpenGL implementations.
- POSIX can be a library too. It doesn’t have to be provided by the kernel. People have been strapping POSIX layers on top of things for ages. This was originally how Mach worked. You can still do weird things on iOS and macOS “below” the POSIX layer (although most POSIX syscalls are just provided by the kernel).
You talk about how hard it is to change APIs… and how much you hate to refactor things every time Google decides they want the shiny new thing. But POSIX is rooted in the 1970s. It sucks. It’s about time to try something new. The entire POSIX model is based around the idea that you have different people using the same computer and you don’t want them to accidentally delete each others’ files. There are a ton of APIs in POSIX which are straight-up shit, like wait(). Sandboxes are unportable and strapped-on, using arcane combinations of things like chroot and cgroups.
Let’s give people a chance to try out something new. Unix is somewhere around 50 years old now. OS research is dying out. Make it easier to run untrusted programs.