Google's cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit goes 1.0 • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by andbberger » Wed, Dec 12, 2018, 9:17 PM UTC

hasbot wrote: post #64

andbberger wrote: post #53

Flutter looks cool. Dart needs more of an ecosystem though. I was trying to play with flutter last week, gave up when I discovered there is no standard lib FFT implementation in Dart.

https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/fft

Yeah I saw that. It's just maintained by some random guy. Which is great and all, but something like fft should really be part of the standard lib.

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

#342

Post by hasbot » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 12:03 AM UTC

andbberger wrote: post #341

hasbot wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/fft

Yeah I saw that. It's just maintained by some random guy. Which is great and all, but something like fft should really be part of the standard lib.

I disagree. Something rarely needed like FFT should not be included in any stdlib. Keeping it out too allows better control and more frequent releases.

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

#343

Post by adamtait » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 1:13 AM UTC

pzo wrote: post #67

Writing plugins/bindings for native code in flutter doesn't look fun. Almost 100 lines of code to write binding for function that doesn't take any parameters and returns simple 'int' (int getBatteryLevel()). This just looks even worse than JNI to me. Don't want to even thing how long time it would take me to write bindings for function that do image processing. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/blob/master/examples/…

I came to the same conclusion (and I'm not a big company that can afford Qt), so I built my own. Before Flutter got a new team @ Google ~3 years back, it was a set of tools for building cross-platform apps with C++ shared libs. A few years ago, this is what many of the FAANG companies were doing with their apps. Then, React Native was released and (I guess) the management at Google decided to take a different tack.

I did some research and found that Dropbox open sourced their internal tool for building cross-platform mobile apps in C++. Djinni (https://github.com/dropbox/djinni) uses an interface definition language to generate bindings between C++ & ObjC & Java (via JNI). From this, I added some tooling to help get the build setup and define some basic UI elements while trying to keep it simple. If you happen to give it a try, I'd love to hear your thoughts: https://github.com/adamtait/ctheworld