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Flutter desktop shells

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Re: Flutter desktop shells

#141

Post by Apocryphon »

coldtea wrote: post #114
grayrest wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> It's apparently the primary language for Google Ads. That's Dart, not Flutter. And even so, Dart transpiles to JS for the Google Ads. They could switch to plain JS, or Typescript, or even move to a whole new implementation of Google Ads, and pull the plug. They also used to use GWT, did that hold on?

It did for nearly a dozen years.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#142

Post by japanoise »

coldtea wrote: post #116
pier25 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK Flutter will be the primary SDK for writing apps in Fuchsia. If this is true, and if the other rumors about Fuchsia replacing Android are also true, then I doubt Flutter and Dart are going anywhere.

Except if Google gets bored with Fuchsia, like it has with tons of projects. Heck, from what you say, it already got bored with Android -- if Fucshia is to replace it in say 2022, it means that Android just lasted around 15 years as a platform.

15 years - so only four years less than MS-DOS ('81 - 2000) by which point it was considered hairy and terrible?

I'm no big fan of Google, but 15 years is plenty long enough. And really, Android is definitely struggling and showing its age by this point.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#143

Post by danbalthasar »

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.

Full disclosure: I'm a Flutter team member who has focused specifically on iOS development.

There are a number of us dedicated to this on the team internally at Google. It's definitely a priority. Each platform has its own challenges though, and there's a very wide variety of issues that can arise that are platform specific. The more feedback we can get about what people want to do that isn't working, the more we can address it :)

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#144

Post by losvedir »

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'll chime in as well that learning Dart is totally trivial. I don't like it all that much, since it really feels like your average Java-based language, but I learned it in a day or two while working on a Flutter app. Flutter is a great framework, and Dart gets the job done.

I'm not sure I'd learn Dart apart from Flutter, but if you just treat it as part of learning the framework (think learning ruby along with rails, or Vue's random HTML-esque DSL, which people do), the overall learning curve is not high.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#145

Post by mamcx »

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…

As I write in

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/9bapwt/thoughts_on_wh...

I think the solution is to split in 2: A UI back-end with logic, layout, etc and a UI front-end renders in each UI native toolkit.

So when write Button(title="hello") is NOT a widget, but a struct with data. It must be pushed to UI.Coccoa.render(button) to show up. But not only that, is possible to say:

  Form
    when(toolkit=UIKit) Field(UILabel="UserName", UiTextBox(PlaceHolder="Write your user")
    Field(Label="UserName", Edit(PlaceHolder="Write your user")
to specialize per specific platform.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#146

Post by ralusek »

0xffff2 wrote: post #112
ralusek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used a good electron application, like VSCode or Figma?

While VSCode is great in a lot of ways, it does not have good performance. What is has is adequate performance and great extension support. It regularly stutters quite badly on my beefy Dell Precision when running on the integrated GPU. I use it as my daily driver, but its performance pales in comparison to something like Sublime.

Have to compare to eclipse/intellij/webstorm rather than sublime.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#147

Post by phkahler »

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 tired I just want to build stuff that solves problems.

I can relate to this. While that's always been part of my motivation, there were other things in play too, like wanting to do something "better" than before. Or using new methods. Or applying X to Y just because. Now, as I get older, I don't want to deal with overly complicated shit, excessive dependencies, or unnecessary bling.

As an example in the GUI space I keep wondering why GTK 4 is getting a scene graph. I've done GFX programming for years and scene graphs are almost never the right answer. Why does a GUI toolkit even need one? No GUI should be that complex. No GUI toolkit should provide one for applications - that's not their job. Don't get me wrong, GTK is my preferred toolkit (in spite of gnome), I just think people keep extending things for the wrong reason. If it works and isn't broke, don't change anything. If the world changed and wants multi-touch, fine, add that. But don't go around doing your science experiments in projects that lots of other people use as infrastructure or building blocks.

Change is constant. Real progress is slow.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#148

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

nova22033 wrote: post #5
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.

yet-another Proprietary Google Technology Dart is open source: https://github.com/dart-lang It took me two minutes to find that using googles real proprietary technology..their search.

Sure, technically. The same way Chromium is technically open source. Funny how everything in the web browser world ends up how Google wants it regardless.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#149

Post by sroussey »

mattlondon wrote: post #106
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 (…

You compile ahead-of-time (AOT) with TypeScript? Where can I get details on this?

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#150

Post by iosonofuturista »

giornogiovanna wrote: post #69
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?

I have been coding mobile apps for a while, both native, with react native, and now I'm doing a flutter app.

Can't say much about this desktop targets, but on the mobile side, in terms of size and performance, they are much closer to native than react.

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