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Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

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Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#101

Post by westoque »

ChikkaChiChi wrote: post #93
westoque wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand the obsession with small binaries and compiled packages. I care about usability and user experience. If it takes 5mb to have a smooth experience then I’m all for it. It’s funny how we now have fiber having 1GB/s internet speeds and we rant about having 1MB size package being too big. Also, everyone’s moving to 4k now with even bigger transfer/data requirements. tldr; 1mb should be a non issue as lo…

Faster speeds for some do not equate to faster speeds for all. This applies doubly so when bandwidth is metered and may cost the end user more money. Abstraction for the engineer should not come at the expense of the person on the other end of the wire.

I disagree. I think Ruby/Rails is a good example of this. They maximize on developer happiness but that doesn’t stop users from using a bloated rails app. Take a look at GitHub/GitLab as an example of a Rails app I guess?

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#102

Post by est31 »

leeoniya wrote: post #78
michaelchisari wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tested it, and the "Hello, World" example results in a 560k js package. Uglified and minified takes it down to around 480k. Gzip takes that to 140k and Brotli compression to 100k. That's a lot to bootstrap an app with, but it's not unreasonable, considering what most frameworks these days will start you with.

it's not just what goes over the wire. that's 560k of JS that has to be parsed and compiled, which is a shitload.

May I introduce to you: preparsed Javascript sent over the wire: https://github.com/binast/binjs-ref

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#103

Post by gbba »

westoque wrote: post #84
zackbrown wrote: post #26

Has Flutter solved its footprint-bloat problem? The internet is littered with reports of 10-100MB+ .ipa and .apk binaries coming out of simple Flutter apps for iOS + Android. Google states they can't imagine the footprint ever dropping as low as 1MB. [1] On Web, 1MB of base runtime is a complete showstopper. Embedded applications may suffer similarly. Does today's announcement mean Google has figured out how to fix t…

I don’t understand the obsession with small binaries and compiled packages. I care about usability and user experience. If it takes 5mb to have a smooth experience then I’m all for it. It’s funny how we now have fiber having 1GB/s internet speeds and we rant about having 1MB size package being too big. Also, everyone’s moving to 4k now with even bigger transfer/data requirements. tldr; 1mb should be a non issue as lo…

Not everyone is so fortunate to have 1GB/s internet.

Waiting for a page to load is a terrible user experience.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#104

Post by westoque »

saagarjha wrote: post #88
westoque wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand the obsession with small binaries and compiled packages. I care about usability and user experience. If it takes 5mb to have a smooth experience then I’m all for it. It’s funny how we now have fiber having 1GB/s internet speeds and we rant about having 1MB size package being too big. Also, everyone’s moving to 4k now with even bigger transfer/data requirements. tldr; 1mb should be a non issue as lo…

> It’s funny now that there’s fiber having 1GB/s internet speeds, we rant about 1MB size package. Half the people in the world probably struggle to have access to a 10 Mb/s connection. Even I go to places with connections that are tenuous at best.

I think there’s a middleground there that if you want to support these countries then there should be a framework for this (Flutter Lite?).. But if you want the complete feature set that is “bloated” but has good ux/ui support then that should be fine as well.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#106

Post by xkapastel »

Zekio wrote: post #83
Hixie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm the Flutter TL.) We support targeting the Web (that's the tech preview we released today), and we support targeting Android, both of which ChromeOS support. We also support development on ChromeOS.

Is there a reason you guys are reinventing Flash under the name flutter? because from what I can tell that is exactly what is happening

What makes you think Flutter is in any way similar to Flash?

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#107

Post by monocularvision »

dliff wrote: post #85
solarkraft wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do users care? It doesn't feel exactly native on Android, but is still fast and looks great (it might indeed be better than native). Afaik the main alternatives, RN and Web (for fully reusable UI) are both heavy and don't feel that native either, yet are popular with developers.

RN definitely feels native... assuming the developers utilized the built-in components properly. RN is an actual native component whose state is backed by a JS bridge. There certainly are poorly written / optimized RN apps. There are also apps that due to their nature/goal shouldn't be RN even at an early stage. (Startup, navigation, threading, network issues for one). However, I would argue that a properly written R…

Except for navigation

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#108

Post by Hixie »

jjnoakes wrote: post #66
zackbrown wrote: post #26

Has Flutter solved its footprint-bloat problem? The internet is littered with reports of 10-100MB+ .ipa and .apk binaries coming out of simple Flutter apps for iOS + Android. Google states they can't imagine the footprint ever dropping as low as 1MB. [1] On Web, 1MB of base runtime is a complete showstopper. Embedded applications may suffer similarly. Does today's announcement mean Google has figured out how to fix t…

The sizes closer to 100MB seem to be from debug builds. From the bug you linked (and this one which it links to: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/16833 ), bare flutter apps are around 4MB on Android. Doesn't seem bad to me.

(I'm the Flutter TL.)

According to today's benchmark numbers, we're at 4414KB on Android and 8572KB on iOS (IIRC, iOS encrypts before compressing so it can't get as good a compression).

This is for our Hello World test app (https://github.com/flutter/flutter/blob/master/examples/hell...), which is more or less the smallest app you can imagine building with Flutter unless you bypass the entire framework and only use the engine directly.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#109

Post by kllrnohj »

networkimprov wrote: post #27
kllrnohj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with Flutter was it was only really suitable for UI code. Lack of efficient parallelisms among other things really kills the ability to do non-trivial work. If you happen to be able to stay in Flutter's async APIs then the illusion holds up OK, but otherwise you have to just kick over to native code to do anything interesting. At which point the multi-platform story obviously falls apart. It's really no…

Maybe Flutter works as a client to a native localhost app? (Analogous to the browser for a localhost web app like Jupyter Notebook[1].) Does it have a Websocket client? [1] https://jupyter.org

There's no reason to bother with websocket stuff, you can just call out to native code via platform channels ( https://flutter.dev/docs/development/platform-integration/pl... )

Just that once you do that you're no longer a portable cross-platform app, and there's limits to what you can do with that pipe in terms of data marshaling and the overhead from that.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#110

Post by monocularvision »

saagarjha wrote: post #58
Klonoar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slant is putting it mild - you gotta start putting a disclosure in these kinds of comments or something. You were a WWDC scholarship recipient, interned at Apple, and seem to base your career on Apple tech. You are not a typical user, you will notice things most ordinary people would never think to notice. The vast majority of apps on a phone aren't even kept open by a user long enough for it to matter. I say this as…

> You were a WWDC scholarship recipient, interned at Apple, and seem to base your career on Apple tech. I dabble in Android and Linux as well ;) > You are not a typical user, you will notice things most ordinary people would never think to notice. The vast majority of apps on a phone aren't even kept open by a user long enough for it to matter. Agree on both counts, but I like to think that users aren't completely cl…

Users dependent on accessibility will also know the difference.
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