Live data from Hacker News

Flutter desktop shells

github.com

41–50 of 322 posts

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#41
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's your alternative? Java Swing? Proprietary Sun (now Oracle) technology. Qt? Proprietary Trolltech tech. Electron? You're back on square one of using Google technology. And winforms, WPF, application kit, etc are all far more proprietary than Flutter.

Kotlin native/multiplatform projects is the answer

Kotlin is by JetBrains.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#42
post #3

I really want to like Flutter, but I someone really don't want to spend the time to learn Dart. I can't really quantify it--some mix of yet-another Proprietary Google Technology, yet another ecosystem, yet another X. I'm tired I just want to build stuff that solves problems.

I would've preferred dart to be more opinionated like golang but its not, you can literally write in almost any style and one advantage of that is if you have experience with any modern language, you should be able to write dart with ease.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#43
post #30
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's your alternative? Java Swing? Proprietary Sun (now Oracle) technology. Qt? Proprietary Trolltech tech. Electron? You're back on square one of using Google technology. And winforms, WPF, application kit, etc are all far more proprietary than Flutter.

The done thing in Java now is JavaFX, and the last time I bothered to work with it (more than a year ago) I remember really liking it. Of course, to me any kind of web tech is a complete non-starter so I am comparing this to using Tcl and WxWidgets.

Funnily enough Tklets worked on the web before even Java or Flash.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#44
post #3

I really want to like Flutter, but I someone really don't want to spend the time to learn Dart. I can't really quantify it--some mix of yet-another Proprietary Google Technology, yet another ecosystem, yet another X. I'm tired I just want to build stuff that solves problems.

Almost every big open source project is going to be unsustainable, if it isn't supported by a company.

Few exceptions do exist, where several companies support out of there need and importance.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#45
post #3

I really want to like Flutter, but I someone really don't want to spend the time to learn Dart. I can't really quantify it--some mix of yet-another Proprietary Google Technology, yet another ecosystem, yet another X. I'm tired I just want to build stuff that solves problems.

Not a good attitude to have. If you try a Hello World in Flutter you'll see it's amazing. Don't knock on it until you try it.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#46
They are still using OpenGL on Mac. Apple has deprecated OpenGL.

I'd definitely wait until the Flutter team has replaced the OpenGL dependency with Apple's Metal. (I really hope they will do it.)

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#47
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's your alternative? Java Swing? Proprietary Sun (now Oracle) technology. Qt? Proprietary Trolltech tech. Electron? You're back on square one of using Google technology. And winforms, WPF, application kit, etc are all far more proprietary than Flutter.

Kotlin native/multiplatform projects is the answer

What are some of the strengths you enjoy about Kotlin?

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#49
post #35
post #29

I just checked out a couple of Flutter’s showcase apps on iOS. The scrolling in the Hamilton app was atrociously stuttery, just really broken. This is on an iPhone X. Then I opened it again and it was fine. Seems like it was doing some initialization work that was blocking the main thread. Not sure if it’s Flutter’s fault but I never see broken scrolling like that on native apps. The other app I tried was some journa…

iOS perf on Flutter has been broken for a while: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/813 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/28113 I wish the team would prioritize this more, but I guess that's Google for you.

Non-charitably, Google probably has an interest in not prioritizing iOS.

Realistically, I'd imagine that Google prioritizes less there because a lot of preference for iOS dev is to just go full native. I do wonder how much Flutter is used by Google for iOS apps though then.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#50
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it is, but I can see why OP looks down on it – just like their web rendering engine, it may be open source, but it's Google holding all the cards and ultimately making all the decisions. It may be opensource now while it's useful for them, but it may end up just like Android over the years: more and more closed bit by bit.

Is Google any worse than some "benevolent dictator for life" like other open-source languages?

Yes. They drop projects all the time, have numerous conflicts of interest, and it's close to impossible to talk with them
Post reply on HN