Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flutter desktop shells

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 322 posts

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#231

Post by robin_reala »

weberc2 wrote: post #124
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.

Context: I was a Qt developer in a past life. The alternatives for cross-platform GUI are 1. Electron 2. Frameworks like C++/Qt C/Gtk 3. Bindings to (2) Using frameworks like Qt in native C++ sucks because C and C++ are just terrible languages for GUI development, even with the bolted on object systems and language extensions (Qt extends the C++ language). Using bindings to those frameworks is nice in theory because…

You missed out webapps, which for a lot of systems are intrinsically better.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#232

Post by legulere »

specialist wrote: post #139
winter_blue wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned Visual Basic 6 from a cousin when I was 8 years old. It was such a joy to use, and made me fall in love with programming. It was so intuitive to use as an 8 year-old. And while Dijkstra might disapprove, the Basic language of VB6 was really simple and easy to grasp as a kid. The coolest part was distribution. Under the File menu, you had an option to build a .exe file. I would build it and put the .exe file…

I know we're talking UI frameworks, but... I think we lost something important with the shift from workgroup to client/server (especially ODBC). I banged out a lot of dBase II, FoxBASE, MS Access (in-house) apps, back in the day. I've not felt as productive since. I miss it dearly.

Software based on that still exists and it’s a hell to maintain.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#233

Post by LyndsySimon »

kickopotomus wrote: post #135
weberc2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context: I was a Qt developer in a past life. The alternatives for cross-platform GUI are 1. Electron 2. Frameworks like C++/Qt C/Gtk 3. Bindings to (2) Using frameworks like Qt in native C++ sucks because C and C++ are just terrible languages for GUI development, even with the bolted on object systems and language extensions (Qt extends the C++ language). Using bindings to those frameworks is nice in theory because…

To add to this, if you like concept/portability/cost-effectiveness of Electron but don't want to mess with the Node/npm ecosystem, there are chromium embedded frameworks out there for Java and Python[0][1][2]. [0]: https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/java-cef [1]: https://github.com/cztomczak/cefpython [2]: https://www.teamdev.com/jxbrowser

Thanks for this - I’d not heard of cefpython. It looks interesting, at the very least.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#234

Post by Rotareti »

sergiotapia wrote: post #109

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.

Google does something similar to push Chrome over Firefox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669586

I don't get why you are downvoted..

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#235

Post by xkapastel »

munificent wrote: post #195
mixedCase wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes some kinds of code nicer, but doesn't significantly affect the expressiveness or capability of the language. Sum types and exhaustive pattern matching aren't about expressiveness, they're tools for aiding code comprehension by increasing the locality of code that has no business being distributed into completely different classes, and decreasing the cost of making changes by heavily reducing the amount of…

> they're tools for aiding code comprehension by increasing the locality of code that has no business being distributed into completely different classes That's true for some kinds of code but not others. This is the classic Expression Problem [0]. For some things, it makes sense to keep all of the code for a single operation together. For others, it makes more sense to keep all of the code for a single datatype toge…

> There's a reason OO and UI have been married together for decades.

People repeat this a lot, that OO goes with UI, but I don't think it's actually true, and I think e.g. React Hooks and immediate mode GUI in general demonstrate that it's not true. OO has been coupled with UI out of inertia, not because OO has unique strengths when applied to UI.

Sum types are a primitive language feature, akin to product types, which absolutely no one rejects the value of. The sum/product analogy to arithmetic is compelling to me: they are the building blocks of complex types and deserve recognition. I think that "zen koan" you mentioned earlier is being very generous to subclassing. You want ADTs most of the time!

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#236

Post by netdur »

stu_k wrote: post #138

Flutter looked great, until I realised that they were re-implementing all the OS controls themselves. For example: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/blob/1db5d66932b873e17c8c... This is the kind of thing that leads to an "uncanny valley" app, where things feel slightly off, or they look good until the OS changes something and Flutter doesn't keep up.

In other hand, when I build something using Flutter I know end use will look at this exact pixel on whatever (android) phone used.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#237

Post by judge2020 »

The_rationalist wrote: post #209
tapoxi wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is Electron so popular, but PWAs have seemingly failed to take off? Everyone was beating the PWA drum for a while, but I've almost never seen it implemented. What's the reason, lack of discoverability? I'd rather run one Chrome instance than a dozen apps that use varying versions of Electron.

https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo

> Carlo locates Google Chrome installed locally.

Is this part of what Microsoft is doing with Chrome being pre-installed (via Edge)? I can't find a source, but I heard that using the existing chrome on the machine would reduce disk size for applications and possibly even allow them to share memory.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#238

Post by markdog12 »

mraleph wrote: post #228
markdog12 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is another called KBC - that one is more like a classical bytecode, it is currently in development I haven't heard of this. Why another bytecode version? Increased performance?

DBC is an interesting beast, the way it was implemented in Dart VM was not like a normal interpreter (e.g. you interpret and then you tier up into JIT which generates native code), but kinda like a pseudoarchitecture. DBC tiers up into... itself. An optimizing JIT in DBC mode would generate optimized DBC bytecodes, not native code. This all kinda makes sense in the environment for which DBC was created - iOS, where y…

Interesting, thx. I assume K = Kernel?

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#239

Post by switchbak »

weberc2 wrote: post #227
darpa_escapee wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I played around with QML, it was basically Javascript.

QML is a declarative language; it has curly braces like JS, but that's about it. It also allows you to extend it with (some old, possibly noncompliant version of) JS, but the declarative markup is a distinct language.

That's like saying every YAML or JSON dialect is a new language. Sure, but not a full-fledged "programming language". QML is quite nice to work with, and well suited to the problem at hand.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#240

Post by scroot »

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…

One of the things that we sacrificed was what today we would call "end-user programmability" but which should really just be called "using a personal computer." Hypercard was a UI builder, a way for regular people to program beyond the strict limits of the software given to them, and a hypermedia platform whose "applications" could be easily distributed. To do most of the things that Hypercard could do on a personal computing system of the early 90s on a system today requires someone to learn a full fledged programming language
Post reply on HN