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Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

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Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#11

Post by amimetic »

huangc10 wrote: post #7

I scanned through your two articles (part 1 and part 2) and wanted to read more about scope. Although I do find your experiments interesting, scope is really the question. At small scale (single developer with a few view controllers and models), your experiments might make sense but when talking about scaling, I don't think your UI and performance results are relavent. How does a project with hundreds of views, model…

But a lot harder to address (probably effectively impossible). This is actually one of the best comparisons I’ve seen.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#12

Post by brobot182 »

This performance analysis is not very useful. How taxing an app is on the CPU is not a user-visible metric, unlike, for example, the time it takes from tapping on an app to it being responsive. The taxing of the CPU is only valuable to think about when thinking when analyzing battery impact (and it takes a lot more analysis than what was given). I’d be much more interested to see:

- startup time

- time to transition between screens (and ideally with more views on each screen, eg make two copies of each view)

- differences in network performance, if any

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#13

Post by alamaslah »

thorum wrote: post #8

Have people found Dart to be a useful programming language for purposes other than Flutter? Does it provide a benefit over existing languages for other kinds of tasks? I like a lot of what Flutter offers for cross-platform development, but it's hard for me to justify the cost of learning a separate language just for one tool, versus (for example) React Native which uses a multipurpose language with a massive ecosyste…

Apperantly, "Google builds many critical web apps using the Dart language, often with AngularDart." [1]

I have never heard this from anyone else though.

[1]https://dart.dev/web

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#14

Post by jeroenhd »

jasondclinton wrote: post #2

Don't miss the link at the bottom of the article to CPU utilization numbers. tl;dr: Flutter and React Native are dramatically easier to develop for than native toolkits and Flutter CPU utilization is better than native toolkits. That... is not what I was expecting.

Flutter tries to offload as much as possible to the GPU I think. This means the CPU load will likely be lower but GPU usage will likely be higher. Depending on the device the app is running on, this can still make the Flutter application consume more power.

I'd be interested to see the performance comparison taking into account both CPU and GPU usage.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#15

Post by markdog12 »

thorum wrote: post #8

Have people found Dart to be a useful programming language for purposes other than Flutter? Does it provide a benefit over existing languages for other kinds of tasks? I like a lot of what Flutter offers for cross-platform development, but it's hard for me to justify the cost of learning a separate language just for one tool, versus (for example) React Native which uses a multipurpose language with a massive ecosyste…

We've been using Dart for years on a successful web app, front-end, back-end, and tooling. It's simple to learn. We've had devs experienced in C++ contributing to the codebase in a couple of days without any prior exposure. It's a great general purpose language, and with recent addition of extension methods and NNBD coming soon, it's getting even better. Ecosystem isn't as extensive as JS world, but it's pretty good. (As someone else in this thread stated, I too dislike the required semicolons, but no biggie, and there's an issue to perhaps remove or make them optional, maybe it'll happen eventually)

Give the language tour a quick look: https://dart.dev/guides/language/language-tour

I've been using Dart since the start (~8 years ago), and follow language development very closely.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#16

Post by Scarbutt »

thorum wrote: post #8

Have people found Dart to be a useful programming language for purposes other than Flutter? Does it provide a benefit over existing languages for other kinds of tasks? I like a lot of what Flutter offers for cross-platform development, but it's hard for me to justify the cost of learning a separate language just for one tool, versus (for example) React Native which uses a multipurpose language with a massive ecosyste…

Learning the language is going to be like 3% of learning Flutter/Mobile development.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#19

Post by redsolver »

thorum wrote: post #8

Have people found Dart to be a useful programming language for purposes other than Flutter? Does it provide a benefit over existing languages for other kinds of tasks? I like a lot of what Flutter offers for cross-platform development, but it's hard for me to justify the cost of learning a separate language just for one tool, versus (for example) React Native which uses a multipurpose language with a massive ecosyste…

I personally use Dart for almost every task.

Frontend - Flutter for the UI (Android, iOS and Web) Backend REST Services - Pure Dart or Aqueduct.io for more complex apps Scripting on my PC Command Line Interfaces for different Tools Advent of Code solutions Blockchain stuff Chat bots ... much more

So why do I like Dart?

The default libraries are amazing - dart:convert, dart:io and more. The asynchronous language features like async, Future and Streams are the best ones I found in a language until now. The Dart and especially Flutter docs (just look at the animation curves section) as well as the official YouTube videos do a great job of teaching different subjects. The combination of dynamic and statically typed objects and variables works really well in most cases. The List and Map operators are really good and easy to use. Package management with pub works and is fast.

Disadvantages

The Ecosystem for non-mobile apps needs more libs.

Conclusion

Try Flutter and see if you like working with Dart, it's very easy to pick up.

Re: Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment

#20

Post by skybrian »

thorum wrote: post #8

Have people found Dart to be a useful programming language for purposes other than Flutter? Does it provide a benefit over existing languages for other kinds of tasks? I like a lot of what Flutter offers for cross-platform development, but it's hard for me to justify the cost of learning a separate language just for one tool, versus (for example) React Native which uses a multipurpose language with a massive ecosyste…

Google uses it for web apps and the Dart team itself uses Dart for all their command line tools.

In the latest release they added support for creating standalone binaries. I haven't tried it but it sounds promising.

There is a good package manager and a decent selection of libraries. I haven't tried it out lately though.

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