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Flutter desktop shells

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Re: Flutter desktop shells

#61

Post by danite »

yc-kraln wrote: 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.

To me Dart is pretty disappointing. Modern languages like Swift and Rust have shown the power of incorporating functional features like sum types and pattern matching. Dart just feels like the same sort of OO language we've been getting since Java became popular.

Edit: Also the continued existence of null in new programming languages is a baffling choice to me.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#62

Post by spaceheretostay »

yc-kraln wrote: 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'm personally excited about Flutter largely because it seems the preferred development environment for Fuchsia. People will complain that Google kills projects too soon and too often, but I feel like Google has an MO and when you figure it out you can guess which products will live and die.

I think Fuchsia and Flutter are Google's primary likely plans for the future of their consumer platforms. I don't really know why, it's just a feeling.

A lot of it comes from Google planning 10+ years out a lot of the time. Reader was a mistake to kill, but you could see how Google management thought it would not be a widely useful product in the long-term future (though let's repeat, they were wrong).

I think Flutter+Fuchsia has that 10+ year plan to it. I'm on board with Dart because it seems likely to be a major ease on development along with a likely promising future.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#63

Post by abalone »

yunyu wrote: post #35
abalone wrote: 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.

Ah, thanks for the links. So jitteriness is a known issue.

FWIW I doubt it’s that Google doesn’t care about iOS.. it’s kind of the raison d’être for Flutter, no? Probably has more to do with it being really hard to reinvent a drawing layer from scratch on an OS you don’t control or whatever it is they’re doing. They could be trying their best and just be hitting a wall. Often happens with cross platform frameworks.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#65

Post by nilsocket »

pojntfx wrote: post #39

We already have something like this. It's called the web.

Modern browsers are heavy, each tab takes nearly 50MiB of memory where as native applications may take 2-10 MiB.

But it does work on all platforms.

One more issue is usability, since os desktop environments, doesn't support web-apps. One needs to pack it with electron or something similar to it.

Which increases your application size and memory usage.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#67

Post by StreamBright »

Bahamut wrote: post #49
yunyu wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then they can stop claiming real cross platform solution. To be hones this is exactly the reason I am sceptical to use any of their projects. I never seen something like that from other companies who produce engineering tools like Flutter for example.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#68

Post by fermentation »

gardaani wrote: post #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.)

Surely gl will continue to live on for quite some time on apple’s stuff, considering it is pretty much a lingua franca

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#69

Post by giornogiovanna »

deforciant wrote: post #2

great news :) Flutter/Dart was a joy for me to code in. As a backend engineer I could pretty much skip all nonsense and just build a simple Android/iOS app in a matter of days. I didn't even have to use Android Studio, built and deploy my app straight from the terminal via CLI. I have looked at multiple different solutions how to hack flutter to run on desktop but didn't want to invest my time in them as they would p…

That's incredible. Flutter seems to have a modern API, a great, customizable look, and a growing ecosystem. My only concern is, what are the executable sizes and performance like?

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#70

Post by grayrest »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #55
rubber_duck wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried dart back in the Angular 2 beta days with Angular Dart and after using it I have the exact opposite feeling about it. It's a thing that solved a lot of very real problems that are still halfassed by NPM and Node ecosystem - package manager, build system, tooling around it - it was all a step above the quality of TypeScript/NPM/JS. Saner object semantics, good standard library, good tooling - it just got me…

Ok, but to parent’s point... is it going to last? Is it yet another thing Google will abandon? Is it worth learning, because learning another language has a real cost imo. If Google walks at any point, does Flutter or Dart survive? I’m with him, I want to like the idea, but I think the adoption has been slow and it doesn’t appear like it’s going to suddenly take off. I could be wrong, I just don’t see any successful…

> is it going to last? Is it yet another thing Google will abandon?

It's apparently the primary language for Google Ads. As such, I expect it to be maintained as long as Google continues to sell ads and if they do move away from it you'll have plenty of warning.

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