Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 343 posts

Re: Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

#11

Post by mikece »

pvinis wrote: post #4
bluetidepro wrote: post #2

Congrats on their 1.0 launch! I haven't looked too closely at Flutter yet, to be honest. How does it compare to React Native (besides what a basic Google search will yield)? Has anyone jumped ship for either or after trying one of them?

I'm guessing most answers will be about Dart being the hard pill to swallow for most, and the fact that it render by drawing UI instead of orchestrating like React Native. I still prefer RN, and I don't my opinion changing in the future. I prefer controlling a native view for the apps I make. Maybe a game would be easier with Flutter?

Dart compiles to native ARM binary; a colleague of mine who uses C++ for cross-platform mobile development made a demo app in Flutter, decompiled it, and said it looked like what his C++ apps produced. The JavaScript in your React Native apps won't perform as fast.

Re: Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

#12

Post by CraftThatBlock »

pedrokost wrote: post #10

How does it handle integration with maps libraries (e.g. Google Maps) and BLE support? Anyone has any experience with how well those work with React Native, and could share their experiences?

There's a first party Google Maps plugin, and there's a few BLE plugins, which work pretty well (using flutter_blue in production right now)

Re: Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

#13

Post by bitpush »

fredgrott wrote: post #3
bluetidepro wrote: post #2

Congrats on their 1.0 launch! I haven't looked too closely at Flutter yet, to be honest. How does it compare to React Native (besides what a basic Google search will yield)? Has anyone jumped ship for either or after trying one of them?

someone did a performance test on android react vs flutter vs native app see https://robots.thoughtbot.com/examining-performance-differen...

The original study fell short on rigor and the author posted an updated version here - https://robots.thoughtbot.com/examining-performance-differen...

Re: Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

#14

Post by CraftThatBlock »

bsimpson wrote: post #5

Flutter renders the whole UI, like a game engine. In the past, this has meant that if there isn't a Flutter implemention of a component (like a video player or map), you couldn't add it to your app. I don't know if that's still true. [edit]: It looks like this has been addressed with the PlatformView widget: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/12/flutter-10-googles... [edit]: Sorry, bluetidepro - this was supposed…

There's definitely been work on this as another commenter mentioned, and a first-party Google Maps plugin

Re: Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

#15

Post by basch »

pier25 wrote: post #6
bsimpson wrote: post #5

Flutter renders the whole UI, like a game engine. In the past, this has meant that if there isn't a Flutter implemention of a component (like a video player or map), you couldn't add it to your app. I don't know if that's still true. [edit]: It looks like this has been addressed with the PlatformView widget: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/12/flutter-10-googles... [edit]: Sorry, bluetidepro - this was supposed…

> like a game engine In this aspect it's very similar to Flash or QT.

or canvas or kodi (which has been improved now to not refresh the entire screen.)

Re: Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

#16

Post by gpantazes »

bsimpson wrote: post #5

Flutter renders the whole UI, like a game engine. In the past, this has meant that if there isn't a Flutter implemention of a component (like a video player or map), you couldn't add it to your app. I don't know if that's still true. [edit]: It looks like this has been addressed with the PlatformView widget: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/12/flutter-10-googles... [edit]: Sorry, bluetidepro - this was supposed…

I hated this about CoronaSDK (how the framework would render everything like a game engine to one canvas). It was so much harder to debug things if the only way you can debug components is only within the scope of the framework, and you don't have any of the benefits of using the native views/containers. This means you can't effectively use Appium or UIAutomator or anything nice like that. If Flutter does render everything like a canvas, then that will pretty negatively affect my impression of it.

Re: Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

#18

Post by abraham »

pvinis wrote: post #4
bluetidepro wrote: post #2

Congrats on their 1.0 launch! I haven't looked too closely at Flutter yet, to be honest. How does it compare to React Native (besides what a basic Google search will yield)? Has anyone jumped ship for either or after trying one of them?

I'm guessing most answers will be about Dart being the hard pill to swallow for most, and the fact that it render by drawing UI instead of orchestrating like React Native. I still prefer RN, and I don't my opinion changing in the future. I prefer controlling a native view for the apps I make. Maybe a game would be easier with Flutter?

If you have any experience with TypeScript, Dart isn't that different.

Re: Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

#19

Post by dev_123 »

bsimpson wrote: post #5

Flutter renders the whole UI, like a game engine. In the past, this has meant that if there isn't a Flutter implemention of a component (like a video player or map), you couldn't add it to your app. I don't know if that's still true. [edit]: It looks like this has been addressed with the PlatformView widget: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/12/flutter-10-googles... [edit]: Sorry, bluetidepro - this was supposed…

How does interactive debugging and inspection work? This is the true power of the web as a platform.

Re: Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0

#20

Post by mikece »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #17

Would like to use it for a Linux app. Looking forward to when that has first class support.

The widget layer is written in C++ (Skia). There's no reason the Flutter toolkit couldn't be quickly adapted to Linux. Or FreeBSD. Or Windows, macOS, OS/2 or even Windows Mobile.
Post reply on HN