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Flutter desktop shells

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Re: Flutter desktop shells

#101

Post by kllrnohj »

wellpast wrote: post #74

Every so often for the past several years I'll go evaluate options for cross-platform desktop app development and I always come back with an enormous handful of options and all of which fall short on some measure. I would really think that this "problem" would have a great solution by now. But I think most of the developer attention is on web for obvious reasons (more ease, more conducive to mistakes/novices/etc). Ho…

There's aspects of Flutter I don't like, but the cross-platform seems to strike a fairly compelling middle ground vs. what you've probably had experience with. It's almost like the C approach. There's the common stuff abstracted that's not particularly platform-specific (here's how you draw a red box, here's how you load a jpeg, etc...), and then all the really platform-specific things, like theming, is handled by just a handful of basically #ifdefs

So much so that you literally have platform-specific widget implementations to go along with the platform-specific themes. Which sounds worse than it is, but defining new widgets is super easy.

Not a write-once-run-everywhere but more like a write-1.2x-to-support-2-platforms type of thing. It risks being uncanny-valley at times, and implementation can drift from platform needing re-alignment, but it should let you do those really platform-specific stuff in sane enough ways.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#102

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

wellpast wrote: post #74

Every so often for the past several years I'll go evaluate options for cross-platform desktop app development and I always come back with an enormous handful of options and all of which fall short on some measure. I would really think that this "problem" would have a great solution by now. But I think most of the developer attention is on web for obvious reasons (more ease, more conducive to mistakes/novices/etc). Ho…

Copied from another comment on of mine so you see it:

ReactXP (https://microsoft.github.io/reactxp/) uses TypeScript and targets mobile and desktop platforms using native controls, not emulated controls. While Flutter doesn't work yet for desktop or web, ReactXP already works for these environments, and is used in the new Skype for Web.

Windows support is done and targets W10, Xbox, and Windows Mixed Reality. MacOS support is experimental, but mostly working. Linux currently needs an Electron wrapper.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#103

Post by osullivj »

nradov wrote: post #98
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.

In general it's just really disappointing that in 2019 the development frameworks we have available are still objectively worse in terms of developer productivity, reliability, and documentation than what we had with Microsoft Visual Basic or Borland Delphi back in 1996. I totally understand that these modern frameworks are superior when it comes to cross-platform compatibility and easy application distribution, but…

Xerox Alto [1] had GUI, Smalltalk 72 dev env and TCP/IP networking in 1973. How much real progress has there been in software technology since then?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#104

Post by burtonator »

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 think Typescript is going to obliterate Dart... it's really amazing.

I love working with it more than any other languages I've worked with.

Python, Java, Go, Javascript, Lisp...

I think there's some combination between it being typesafe, amazingly expressive, dynamic and also productive because you're on the web platform.

Generics might be a bit much for some Javascript people because it's like a whole language in and of itself but it's worth it IMO.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#105

Post by skybrian »

robmccoll wrote: post #53

We finally have an answer to "how do I write GUI apps that work on all three major desktop OSes, both major mobile OSes and the web?" that isn't just run a web browser instance per application. Nothing wrong with Javascript these days, but it's hard to get consistency and the performance just isn't there. Something that compiles AOT and renders its own controls directly through OpenGL sounds great. Technically Qt can…

Well, no, we don't have it yet. Still in progress, no announced ship date.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#106

Post by mattlondon »

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.

Same here - its a real shame they picked a niche language for this rather than the now universal Typescript like everything else.

As such, I'll pass since this feels like a dead-end just like polymer was. It felt like polymer had the same hype cycle as flutter - was going to make development so much easier/faster/less error prone etc. It is now a semi-abandoned legacy hulk of a project that people hate working with (anecdote I know, but that has been my experience) because its totally different and alien to how people are used to working, for no/little obvious benefit apart from "this is from google! its got to be good!"

I wish Google would just accept defeat and support existing common tools rather than suffering from "not-invented-here" syndrome and create something totally different and non-compatible, rather than contributing to the existing industry de facto standards to make them better. There may still be a few "google-scale problems", but UI frameworks and HTML libraries are not them.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#107

Post by winter_blue »

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.

This is exactly how I feel. The lack of freedom to choose your own language is appalling. I don't want to be locked into a single language. If they targeted the JVM platform instead, would have the choice of Clojure, Scala, Kotlin, JRuby, etc. Also, targeting the JVM makes a lot of sense of Android, since ART complies JVM bytecode down to super-efficient machine code (at installation). I was really disappointed by Google's decision to push those wanting to use Flutter to learn Dart. Fortunately, the Flutter Windows and Linux libraries provide C and C++ wrappers[1]; hopefully these become preeminent, and result in other language bindings for Flutter. I've been tired enough with the web being JavaScript-dominated for a long time that the rise of options like TypeScript, ReasonML, Elm, etc. (in industry) felt like a breath of fresh air to me.

[1] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Desktop-shells#c-wra...

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#109

Post by sergiotapia »

Hot take:

Who's to say Google's plan isn't to make this become big, then purposely give iphone a shittier experience just a few ms of more jank to make android look better? Think long, long term. I wouldn't trust this.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#110

Post by jeffhuys »

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 would say get used to it. I don't mean that in a degrading way or something, but we're developers. Until the day you retire you will need to keep up with technologies.
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