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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

#241

Post by Hixie »

cornstalks wrote: post #132
Hixie wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

Fellow Googler here. I think it’s best to report those numbers with the appropriate SI prefix: 4.414 MB and 8.572 MB. Reporting numbers as “X thousand kilobytes” makes it harder to grok the real scale.

Sorry, I just copied and pasted the number as it appears on our benchmark page. :-)

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

#242

Post by RussianCow »

tiles wrote: post #185
magicalist wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is possibly a very dark direction for the Web Yes, that imagined dark direction for the web is indeed very dark. Call it too big to ship reasonably, but Chrome didn't ship an Angular player or Polymer player, so I don't see what suggests they'd start now.

Didn't they ship a Dart VM?

They decided not to: https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/6682831673622528

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

#244

Post by ericathegreat »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #140
Hixie wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given our architecture, it doesn't cost us any more performance to look like the OEM widgets than a bespoke widget set, and indeed it shouldn't cost us any more to look like the OEM widgets than it should cost the OEM widgets themselves to look like the OEM widgets, because we're targeting the GPU directly.

It does cost more in developer hours though. Every update to every emulated UI requires an update on your end. There will be a lag between that update where apps will be noticeably different than native. Can you honestly guarantee Flutter will always keep up with all the environments you plan on targeting? Will Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android always look and feel the same? That seems like a lot more work to maintain…

Relying on native components means that differences in platforms get propagated up into application developer land. Consider: Two "native" components have slightly different behaviours. Therefore, the framework also implicitly has two slightly different behaviours. Therefore, the developer using the framework has to cater for two slightly different behaviours. This is where the real pain of cross platform development happens, and the reason it has such a bad rep.

By bypassing the target environment's native controls, they're paying more heavily in render code, but they're getting rid of all of that propagation of pain to higher up the development stack. As a developer, that's a cost I'm willing to pay.

(* For reference, I have used Flutter, Xamarin, React Native and Java at various points in time, and Flutter has very rapidly become my preference. It has a consistency that I appreciate. But of course, ymmv.)

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

#245

Post by pjmlp »

sandGorgon wrote: post #182

Can someone from the Google team comment on what's going on - https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/07/kotlin-is-now-googles-pref... > Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first,” Google writes in today’s announcement https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/07/google-launches-jetpack-co... > Google today announced the first preview of Jetpack Compose, a new open-source UI toolkit for Kotlin developers who want to use…

Internal politic wars at Google, with management having popcorns to see who wins at the end.

If you are confortable with Qt, JavaFX, Xamarin, there is hardly anything to see with Flutter, plus they are based on programming languages that you actually want to have on your CV, instead of one that was dropped from Chrome and rescued at last minute by AdWords team.

Plus, even Fuchsia is not so focused on Flutter anylonger. Android userspace is being ported to Fuchsia, and now they have a UI Framework agnostic layer, Scenic, with examples in C++ and Rust.

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

#247

Post by Hixie »

westoque wrote: post #104
saagarjha wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

(I'm the Flutter TL)

Our current plan is to support the complete feature set while still supporting places with connectivity around 5Mbit/s. We are still in very early stages (we only just put out the tech preview today!) but we have some confidence that this is possible. Personally I'm more worried about the performance of layout animations (e.g. resizing paragraphs) than about download size, but again, it's early days still.

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

#248

Post by codedokode »

Hixie wrote: post #96
saagarjha wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'm the Flutter TL.) Yeah, I was just writing a design doc earlier today and my math for how big a download we could reasonably expect users to wait for was based on a 5Mbit/s download speed. Half a megabyte takes under a second at that speed, but 5 megabytes takes more like 8 seconds. That's a huge difference. In an environment like the Web, where ephemerality is the norm, you really have to stay below 1MB from wha…

Also please consider how many seconds will it take for a cheap Android phone to parse 5 Mb of JS (and how much memory it would take after parsing, which can be up to 10 times more that original code size). I think it can become much more than 8 seconds, and during parsing the browser will likely become unresponsive.

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

#249

Post by Hixie »

justinph wrote: post #89
yesimahuman wrote: post #40

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…

Try using keyboard navigation or a screen reader on that NYT demo. There isn't a single accessible thing on the page. Not even the logo. You can't even select the text. It's awful.

Odd. Accessibility should work fine. If you can reproduce this, can you file a bug with details of your setup? https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/new?template=BUG.m...

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

#250

Post by mindentropy »

pjmlp wrote: post #245
sandGorgon wrote: post #182

Can someone from the Google team comment on what's going on - https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/07/kotlin-is-now-googles-pref... > Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first,” Google writes in today’s announcement https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/07/google-launches-jetpack-co... > Google today announced the first preview of Jetpack Compose, a new open-source UI toolkit for Kotlin developers who want to use…

Internal politic wars at Google, with management having popcorns to see who wins at the end. If you are confortable with Qt, JavaFX, Xamarin, there is hardly anything to see with Flutter, plus they are based on programming languages that you actually want to have on your CV, instead of one that was dropped from Chrome and rescued at last minute by AdWords team. Plus, even Fuchsia is not so focused on Flutter anylonge…

For embedded devices the only good toolkit is Qt and the licensing costs are pretty high. Flutter for embedded is interesting in this regard.
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