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Google Is Working On Fuchsia OS Support For Apple's Swift Programming Language (androidpolice.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from Android Police: Google's in-development operating system, named "Fuchsia," first appeared over a year ago. It's quite different from Android and Chrome OS, as it runs on top of the real-time "Magenta" kernel instead of Linux. According to recent code commits, Google is working on Fuchsia OS support for the Swift programming language. If you're not familiar with it, Swift is a programming language developed by Apple, which can be used to create iOS/macOS/tvOS/watchOS applications (it can also compile to Linux). Apple calls it "Objective-C without the C," and on the company's own platforms, it can be mixed with existing C/Objective-C/C++ code (similar to how apps on Android can use both Kotlin and Java in the same codebase). We already know that Fuchsia will support apps written in Dart, a C-like language developed by Google, but it looks like Swift could also be supported. On Swift's GitHub repository, a pull request was created by a Google employee that adds Fuchsia OS support to the compiler. At the time of writing, there are discussions about splitting it into several smaller pull requests to make reviewing the code changes easier.
This is a very real problem. Linux is losing the developer mindshare that it once had. Lots of developers are using macOS these days, and like you point out they aren't targeting Linux. Even if they're working on Android apps, Linux is so deeply hidden that it may as well not even be there. The BSDs are seeing a resurgence for server use, and Linux desktop use has withered with the failures of systemd and Gnome 3. I think that Linux may have plateaued, and now we are seeing the beginning of a decline.