Flutter seems to be gaining ground on React Native. And they also have web and desktop ports. Recently flutter overtook react native on Google trends.
Flutter on desktop has been "right around the corner" for about 5 years now.
React Native for Windows and Mac
171–180 of 505 posts
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#172React Native scares me with its dependency webs: http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/react-native From my experience, it's really great to work with and definitely saves a ton of work, but the depgraph above fills me with doubt for use in sensitive applications such as in finance or healthcare. For this reason, I've been trying out Flutter or even considering to go back to native apps. Perhaps there's some kind of middle…
Well javascript's package management is designed around the micropackage. It really doesn't bode well for microservices of any large scale complexity, unless there are concentrated meganodes with limited interconnects like cities and superhighways.
I think the micropackage system is great in theory; it just falls down with bloat and security. Security could at least in theory be mitigated by something like pledge. Right now every developer on the (transitive!) deps authors list effectively has full access to our production systems, and that's ridiculous.
Bloat though ... I mean, if every npm module was simply a directory with a package.json file and a couple js files I'd be happy. But thats almost never true, and usually for bad reasons. I'm not sure how to fix the problem. A few years ago I worked with a guy who maintained a popular little 200 line react image component on npm. The project website was great - with example images and whatnot. Some software we worked on used his library. Our node_modules was huge, and one day I took a look to try and figure out why. It turned out his tiny module was bundling all ~10mb of example images in the package itself.
He was shocked and embarrassed when I pointed it out to him. The library had thousands of stars on github at the time. Lots of people were using it but nobody had noticed and mentioned it to him.
10mb isn't that big, but this is the sort of sloppiness that really adds up over time & thousands of transitive dependancies. Would tooling fix the problem? Maybe a little, but I suspect the problem its partially cultural. A lot of the web development community suffers from a lack of ... thoroughness. Like, the expectation is if the website works and looks pretty, you've done a good job. And invisible bugs and issues get overlooked consistently. Like app bundles which silently include multiple copies of the (200k) moment timezone database. Or obvious security issues that web devs just don't know to look for. I suppose this is how juniors learn - but it feels like a very lonely place sometimes when you have skills and experience.
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by killer exactly? Splice is now on flutter, including web. I'd say that is a pretty demanding app.
A killer app is something like Rails. Rails made Ruby popular, because it was so good that people who otherwise wouldn't have been interested in Ruby were willing to use it for the benefits they got from Rails.
I suppose Flutter is Dart's killer app, since you're comparing frameworks and languages. Rails is to Ruby as Flutter is to Dart, as it were. I suggest you give it a try. Personally, this felt like the "killer" feature to me, fully advanced animations that I'm not sure are possible on native widget based frameworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCyoHclCqc8
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I can't figure out what will be relevant in six months" might have been a legitimate complaint a decade ago, but those days are long gone. React has been a core part of the front end ecosystem for almost 10 years. Angular is more than 10 years old. Vue is the "new kid" on the block at about six years old. React is roughly 10x more popular than Vue or Angular according to npm usage, has been far more popular in usage…
React, almost 10 years? It was only open sourced 7 years ago and definitely took time to fully catch on..
I'm truly amazed to still encounter "omg React is so new and unproven how can we possibly keep up with stuff like this?" posts. Next up: is no-sql just another fad or will it catch on?
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
EDITED React native's GUI compiles to native code. Or something like that. It is very different from Electron.
No, React Native still uses Javascript, not “native code”. It’s different in that it doesn’t use HTML or CSS (which is a major difference, sure).
It uses a combination of both JS and native code. That JS that RN calls ultimately makes calls out to native Andriod and iOS (and Windows, and macOS) APIs that are compiled to Java and ObjC/Swift (and, I assume, C#?). All of RN's targeted platforms leverage scripting bridges for JS, but only a portion of the actual running code is JS, the part that's native is (usually, but not exclusively) generalized.
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows Forms was released on 2002 and is still supported by Microsoft. How long do you think Flutter will be supported by Google? For dev technology, Microsoft has a well-deserved reputation for supporting products for a long time.
> How long do you think Flutter will be supported by Google? I am curious about how often this sentiment gets brought up about Go or Kubernetes.
Go can easily within a year fade away to be replaced with something else. Remember MongoDB?
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be careful with Flutter’s web port. It’s going to be a pretty divergent approach in terms of web dev familiarity, bundle size, and compatibility with native web features (they had to implement copy and paste from scratch, for example). It is very similar to the approach Famous took back when. It is not looked kindly upon by many web platform advocates I know.
The Flutter web port is ridiculous. It circumvents the entire point of a Web page as it's literally just a canvas on the Web page. You lose all advantages that HTML and CSS gives you, links, styling, accessibility, text selection! ... It's basically a flash website... Which admittedly is okay for some applications
You might be misinformed; according to https://medium.com/flutter/hummingbird-building-flutter-for-... Flutter for Web uses HTML & CSS where it can, and falls back to Canvas where it can't.
Flutter for Web is still on Beta, so lets see where it lands. Today, it seems to implement some PWA practices and lazyloading to try and get some performance.
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#178Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#179On the React Native MacOS fork: > This repository is a working fork of facebook/react-native that adds support for the official React Native for macOS implementation from Microsoft. Does anyone know when these changes are planning to be upstreamed?
RN's been available for many years, and little interest has been shown in providing first class support for desktop targets. That said, it wouldn't surprise me if:
1. the recent FB messenger desktop apps are RN.
2. they leverage work done in forks (like this one from MS) to achieve that.
Re: React Native for Windows and Mac
#180I'd love to abandon my C/C++ UI frameworks for React, but I need - consistent rendering/support across multiple platforms and versions - multiple windows - rendering to a window that isn't owned by the UI being rendered or created by the framework Can I do that all in React native? Edit: don't need to bring up electron.
Sciter then ( https://sciter.com ): - multiple platforms... Yes: Windows (x32,x64, ARM64), from XP to 10, MacOS, Linux/GTK, IoT and mobiles. - multiple windows - Yes. Multiple desktop windows and you can even render separate DOM elements in popup windows. - rendering to a window that isn't owned by the UI being rendered Yes, you can render it on top DirectX, OpenGL, Vulkan (coming) or in child window/nsview/gtkwidget…
HTML is half of the problem, the DOM is just fundamentally unsuited for app UI rendering, and CSS is a nightmare when applied to UI controls rather than text documents. What we need is a cross platform well-thought-out scene graph like Flash had or Flutter (kinda) has.