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

Post by hardwaresofton » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 1:04 PM UTC

jpincheira wrote: post #141

hardwaresofton wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Flutter has achieved is impressive, but I don't think it's reasonable to classify Dart as a good language in 2020 off the back of it -- the competition is just too good. Dart feels like an older java in a time when java doesn't even feel like java (with the recent versions, along with other JVM options). For example, try and check out Dart's JSON serialization story[0], it's bad compared to Haskell, Rust and eve…

Don’t get me wrong but I know a lot of people that don’t use the right tool for the job. And people here are very biased towards Dart. I was a software engineer coding objc and swift at a pretty well known publicly traded German company. If it wasn’t because of typescript/js I wouldn’t have been able to build my startup completely on my own supporting backend, web, iOS and Android.

Post by bsaul » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 1:35 PM UTC

CraftThatBlock wrote: post #35

sleepinseattle wrote: post #27

Measure power consumption and framerate (especially for scrolling scenarios) rather than CPU usage before making any performance claims for mobile.

Flutter uses the Chrome rendering engine (Skia) and scrolling is fully fluid (in release mode). React native uses native views (if implemented correctly) and is usually very fluid too

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

discreteevent wrote: post #138

pjmlp wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like Common Lisp and Smalltalk do.

What's impressive is that they brought this experience to cross platform mobile. Reminds me of Guy Steele's quote about Java bringing the mainstream halfway to lisp but people could only complain.

Post by isoos » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

dickjocke wrote: post #50

markdog12 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I discovered Flutter recently and love it! I want to buy in all the way. Could you go more into your experiences, especially with backend and tooling? I'm pretty sold on it for web dev, as I spent a ton of time trying to get into react/react native and am ready to move one. I guess my main concern is support for libraries. I don't recall seeing Dart libraries for most GCP/AWS services. And what about all of the bajil…

Post by crowbahr » Sat, Jan 04, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

amimetic wrote: post #125

crowbahr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an Android developer I looked at the code he wrote and felt bad for him. Of course it was painful trying to set all your styling up programmatically for the table! Use a viewholder pattern and a recyclerview/adapter then throw your data into the adapter. Make a simple xml file for your rows and inflate those into the viewholder then you're good to go! None of these clumsy declarative attempts to do what xml does w…

This is exactly the kind of thing that is unnecessarily hard in non-React-like UI frameworks. XML definitely does not do this well! In React Native or Flutter I can just declaratively go from an array to rows of UI. It will be a few lines of code and will be incredibly clear (and easy to change). In Android or iOS I can either do something procedural (which is messy, hard to reason about etc) or do something horrifyi…