Last I checked (years ago), the userspace was implemented partially with musl, which reads
> 'musl, pronounced like the word "mussel", is an MIT-licensed implementation of the standard C library targetting the Linux syscall API,
Now, they're announcing running Linux programs on Fuchsia. Sure seems to me they're implementing a Unix-like system, even if their kernel was written from scratch.
The BSD world doesn't consider the userspace very separate from the kernel space, it's all part of a single system.
I would argue it's very much 'based on Unix' as soon as they start adding POSIX APIs. They're adding POSIX APIs because they work.
>Fuchsia does not require that programs use libc's ABI. Programs are free to use their own libc, or to do without.
As has been said in other comments, it's not much different from Wine or Linux emulation in FreeBSD.
I think that someone at google built fuschia for the sake of building it. Their core business is still search, that's all Android is. If they launch their own fuschia based handset, people are unlikely to switch, OEMs are unlikely to switch. It's just a failed concept.