111–120 of 467 posts
I'm hopeful Dart will get better given what I've seen and what a member of the Dart team mentioned in a thread a few weeks ago, but right now it's still nothing that gets close to the ancient ML. Would be nice if they learnt a few things from Facebook or Microsoft.
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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
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I’m not sure why this is downvoted, as it summarizes Flutter pretty well. Flutter’s “Cupertino” theme is obviously an emulation if you use it for more than a minute. If you want your app to look like an Android app on both platforms, though, I think it does pretty well at that.
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.
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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
No one has (yet) mentioned the main reason I ignored Flutter when it initially came out and why I continue to have reluctance - It's google. They have a terrible track record with products AND with libraries. GWT? Dart (pre flutter)? NaCl? How about all those initial Angular devs? That's not a statement on the quality of the result (though some of those examples do indicate concerns), but if I'm not alone in avoiding…
You didn't even mention the Closure library which was released and then practically abandoned. We invested so much into Closure where I worked, with the promise that this is what Google used internally, when suddenly Angular dropped out of Google and that sucked up all the oxygen in the room.
I remember looking at the Closure library back in 2010 and decided against using it, but from what I can see it still looks pretty decent. It doesn't look as nice to use as Angular or React, but it's been around a lot longer than either of them and probably has to remain backward-compatible with some pretty old code.
Flutter for Web is heavily reminiscent of Famous with its custom layout system and off-DOM rendering (or guessing DOM rendering support w/ CSS transforms of divs). To see, just view-source on the NYT demo. Quite divergent from the web platform in my opinion. The fact that they have to re-implement copy and paste (and, accessibility features!) further adds to that: https://medium.com/flutter-io/bringing-flutter-to-the…
Web development with DOM, CSS, etc. is a morass of complexity. I'm really excited about a fresh approach to UI development. If they can pull it off, it is going to be very compelling. It is going to take an enormous amount of investment. Something like this could only be done by a "FAANG" size company.
Except it is still a very early stage product and feature set of one tenth of what QT or GTK would have provided.
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(I'm the Flutter TL) If you can tell that we're not using OEM widgets, we consider that a bug. Please file it and explain what the difference is. We're definitely not perfect, but fidelity is a high priority for us this year. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/new?template=BUG.m...
Personally, I'd prefer actual native if that was my aim, as opposed to something that looks exactly like it, but actually has layers of styling beneath it in order to look the same. Why? Because if I want the native look, I'm more inclined to be sensitive to my app's size and performance. That said, I do understand that many people want the seeming of a native app, even if there's a bit of a blowout in size and perfo…
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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.
Not to mention there are a thousand situations even inside of the major cities where a few mbps (if that) is all you can muster.
I for one hate pages that take minutes to load... and it happens a lot more than you’d hope.
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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.
True, but (unfortunately) it's hardly an outlier in today's ecosystem.
You can see this in the flutter_web/examples/gallery example. [`webdev build` failed for me in examples/gallery, so I'd love to see what a successfully minified version of that example looks like — I'm currently deeply skeptical.]
Compared to React/Vue/Angular and friends, this appears to be a monstrous outlier.