It should be slightly less janky than Android with all the Java in it.

There are still a lot of midrange phones out there, and IOS has always felt smoother.

> It should be slightly less janky than Android with all the Java in it.

GP comment mentions that userspace apps on Fuschia are predominantly Flutter apps, which isn't only running Dart (in a VM), but also using Skia for 2D (and 3D?) graphics, and that isn't going to go faster than native. With Fuschia, I believe the primary objective has always been a secure kernel base to build the rest of the OS upon. That is pretty hard to do with Linux without performance costs or support from underlying architectures (ex: https://github.com/google/kernel-sanitizers).

The Android Runtime otoh has long moved to AOT for hot-paths (profile-guided optimization) and JIT for the cold ones.

Dart is also AOT/JIT compiled since version 2 was introduced.

Java is AOT compiled since Android 5, switched into AOT/JIT with PGO feedback loop since Android 7, and as of Android 8 PGO data gets shared across devices via the Play Store.

The biggest difference is that while some Android devices might be a sluggish if too many applications are taking liberties with memory, on iOS they just die, specially on Objective-C code, where not everyone checks all pointer related code.

I'm a bit surprised Chromecast is still kicking. It used to be a pretty unheralded innovation which I found to be really useful. But, honestly, these days I usually have multiple other options to get most content up on a TV screen.

Yeah I have the Android TV based Chromecast device here. It's janky and laggy in the UI :-)

> Then most of it got tossed

Surely someone "took responsibility" for that one

Pardon my ignorance, but what UI in Chromecast? From what I remember, there are just pretty pictures with clock when you don't play anything and your chosen stream, when you do.

But if you mean UI of Android TV itself, then it seems to be a choice of a suitable SoC, or rather not picking an underpowered one. For example, Nvidia picked well for their Shield line.

The topic in the thread here is the Google/Nest Home Hub / Home Hub Max display assistants.

They initially ran a version of the same "CastOS" (we didn't call it that then) the same as what ran on Chromecast sticks. But the landing screen on it is richer than what boots on a Chromecast, and it had an interactive gesture based touch screen. CastOS is just a Linux distrib with some boot and build stuff stolen from Android, but the user space for it is basically booting straight into a chromium based web shell.

Before it (the display assistant) launched, I wrote (and ported from ChromeOS) some of the gesture stuff on it. And some of the accessibility features (magnification).

The "Dragonglass" UI that ran on it was originally built as a HTML/TypeScript stack application. Later it was rewritten in Flutter/Dart, ran for a while like that on CastOS using a Wayland-based wedge layer; and now it runs on Fuchsia.

(I don't think any of this is particularly internal or secret anymore since it's old news and replaced, and most of it was visible from the public chromium repo. Also they can't fire me anymore because I quit ;-) )

Oh, those devices do have UI... somehow I managed to skip this entire line. As I said, pardon my ignorance :-).

Thanks for the behind the scenes.