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Ask HN: React Native or Flutter?

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Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter?

#21

Post by lima »

latchkey wrote: post #10
realusername wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Flutter as well, I've tried both react-native and Flutter for some small size side projects. I did not like Flutter at all when I've tried it just after the release but now that it had time to mature a bit, it's an excellent tool. However I don't see why people try to push it on the web, it just renders everything in a canvas, it's a poor fit for web development.

Oh wow, I didn't notice that it went to a canvas! Thanks for pointing that out. Definite consideration for whether or not to do use that in the future.

The theme editor is a nice example where it makes sense.

Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter?

#22

Post by realusername »

latchkey wrote: post #10
realusername wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Flutter as well, I've tried both react-native and Flutter for some small size side projects. I did not like Flutter at all when I've tried it just after the release but now that it had time to mature a bit, it's an excellent tool. However I don't see why people try to push it on the web, it just renders everything in a canvas, it's a poor fit for web development.

Oh wow, I didn't notice that it went to a canvas! Thanks for pointing that out. Definite consideration for whether or not to do use that in the future.

I don't know if there's a plan to create a DOM render but that's definitely possible the way flutter is done. It's just much more work of course.

Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter?

#23

Post by onion2k »

React Native. Not because of the framework, because they both work well, but hiring a JS dev is about a billion times easier than hiring a Dart dev so if you need someone to support you later things will go much better.

Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter?

#25

Post by crispinb »

pjmlp wrote: post #18
crispinb wrote: post #6

I think if you are starting mobile app development, learn the basics of the 2 main native stacks (iOS, Android). Preferably learn one of them well. A couple of years ago I might have suggested web (PWA's) as a third kind of 'native' app, but that route seems to have lost traction. In my experience, you'll be a better x-platform developer if you know at least the basics of the native platforms you're targeting. This i…

Quite the contrary, what I have seen around here is that what would have been a Cordova/Ionic project, nowadays is usually done as PWA.

Well it's only an impression I have. I'm not seeing much use of PWAs in the wild, and there seem to be fewer articles touting them, but that's just my sample. If what you say is true, I'd be pleased.

Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter?

#26

Post by bsaul »

i’m currently asking myself the same question, and i used to like flutter approach. However, after having tried a flutter demo app from the store ( the one comparing vegetables), and seeing it lag on scrolling on an iphone10 , plus seeing that the keyboard placeholder doesn’t follow the keyboard animation ( so you see a white mark behind), i’m seriously reconsidering this option.

plus, i feel safer coding my business logic in typescript than dart. It’ll be more useful in case i want to code a web site (flutter web renders to a 2d canvas , which feels wrong for some reason), eventhough dart theorically compiles to js, i feel typescript is more used for that.

Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter?

#28

Post by diminoten »

pjmlp wrote: post #16

Neither of them. Qt, Xamarin, PWA, C++ with native views would be my picks.

I swear to God, a feature I'd literally pay to have on HN is a verifiable tag on each username that provides info on how many years and in what domain a person has been working, because some of the shit in these comments is patently absurd. C++ with native views? Seriously?

Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter?

#29

Post by maxharris »

I'm working on a new framework that attempts to take what I think are the best ideas from the web (zero installation, easy to lay things out without tracking measurements yourself) and combines them with the best ideas from React (functions as components, ideally no mutable state). I want to solve what I see as the original sin of the web: inept separation of presentation from content.

The other thing I aim to solve is the issue of the browser and corresponding web standards being a monolith so large that only Google and Apple can afford to implement them. By wrestling back control over layout, I hope to show that a next-generation browser could be much more like what James Mickens laid out with the research he presented in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uflg7LDmzI

I decided to prototype it in JavaScript, and right now it just renders into a canvas element. I love working on it, because all the unit tests run really fast. It can do that because there's no browser in the way - node-canvas is much lighter weight. Once the design is settled down, I'd like to rewrite it in Rust. The other advantage of this is that it is incremental. It'll run in any existing web browser, and building a cut-down browser that isn't web-compatible is doable in a few weekends.

The best way to see its capabilities so far is to look at the test screenshots: https://github.com/maxharris9/layout/tree/master/test/screen... - see especially text-actual.png, text-concave-cutout-actual.png, text-diamond-actual.png. I fell down a rabbit-hole with that a bit and made it wrap text around arbitrary polygons, hyphenating on syllable breaks and everything.

I just lost my job a couple of weeks ago, and I've been taking time off to work more on this thing. Tomorrow I hope to get mouse click events tracked through the component tree. And at some point in a week or two, when that's done, I really should write the application that I had in mind for it!

I know a lot of people have concerns about accessibility with the approach I've taken, and all I can say to that is, please help me work on that instead of criticizing me. I know there is talk about an accessibility DOM coming in browsers, but I fear that I'll just have to fall back to rendering plain HTML in order to drive screen readers, which is a terribly inefficient and indirect way of doing things. Also I don't even know where to begin with screen readers, what's the most popular software for that, etc.

Re: Ask HN: React Native or Flutter?

#30

Post by reactor »

onion2k wrote: post #23

React Native. Not because of the framework, because they both work well, but hiring a JS dev is about a billion times easier than hiring a Dart dev so if you need someone to support you later things will go much better.

I dabbled with Dart for sometime, got an impression that a competent Java/C# developer can pick up Dart in no time, I think hiring shouldn't be an issue.
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