Flutter for Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: Flutter for Linux

#61

Post by kllrnohj » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

axegon_ wrote: post #15

I'm actually a great fan of flutter and imo it is the best cross-platform solution out there. Probably except for web: though it produces very good result performance-wise, the end result is never really "web" and doesn't act like traditional web. As for desktop applications(whether it be windows, linux or mac), it seems like it's too mobile-oriented. I see great potential for simple solutions like self-service opera…

My experience with Flutter was that making the UI itself was pretty great. But making the rest of the app sucked. FFI support is bad. Platform channels are miserable. Doing it all in Dart is awful because there's no cheap concurrency - it's the same multi-heap with expensive "IPC" shittiness that you get with webworkers, but way less justified since you're nearly always on platforms with native threads. It's a huge pain to try and migrate piecemeal too, so if you have an existing app/codebase you're looking at a re-write.

UI performance was fine (not any better than native though), but RAM usage was pretty bad, a lot higher than native.

Really fantastic iteration workflow, though.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#62

Post by k__ » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

thomasfortes wrote: post #58

k__ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revery also looks nice. I wish they had more funding, tho. I find Reason/OCaml more compelling than Dart.

There's a guy that managed to compile and run revery on android, I would love to have that as an option since I'm already familiar with ocaml/reason and only barely literate in Dart (and also prefer functional languages over object oriented ones)... https://github.com/EduardoRFS/reason-mobile

Pretty cool!

They have mobile platforms on their roadmap for quite some time now, but somehow the project doesn't seem to get much traction.

I guess, Dart would be dead by now, if it wasn't for Google pushing it with Flutter.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#63

Post by kllrnohj » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

The_rationalist wrote: post #35

mikece wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Only if they drop Fuchsia." I hate to say it, but this is beginning to look like a real possibility. It looks like Google has been implementing into Android a lot of the modular, "make the system easier to update" aspects of Fuchsia with each release of Android. I think Oracle's continuing fight to make Google pay financially for using Java is doing more to keep Fuchsia alive anything else. If Oracle relents then it…

If Android switch to openjdk like everybody else, they'll be lawsuit proof

They did: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/android-n-switch...

The runtime remains ART, though, but that wasn't the issue in the lawsuit.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#64

Post by andrepd » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 7:38 PM UTC

eklavya wrote: post #6

I am so excited about flutter ecosystem. Hopefully linux gets first class beautiful native apps now. I also hope against hope that qt is officially supported as a backend so KDE is not left out.

Judging by the example in TFA, we must have very different conceptions of what "beautiful" means. That is an atrocious application.

* Ungodly amounts of whitespace (seriously, look at that sidebar, look at that search bar. WHY? too much optimisation for what "looks good on a screenshot", maybe?)

* Undecipherable symbols where there's plenty of f#cking space to write labels god damn it

* I bet bad/nonexistant keyboard support (remember alt-* to navigate menus?)

* Ugly to look at (subjective)

Re: Flutter for Linux

#65

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #45

cxr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the Vala folks and Gnome in general could be convinced to drop Vala in favor Dart, or move valac in the direction of accepting a language that looks like (a subset or a complex supersubset of) Dart, it could be an effective hedge against Google pulling out. It would also be an instance of Gnome and the various commercial vendors who rely on it being ahead of the curve—particularly for mobile, while proprietary ven…

Gnome is already adopting Rust, and GJS has been the Vala alternative for ages, so no luck for Dart. Also Gnome has had multiple language bindings since the early days, most of them have more use across Gnome apps than Vala.

[deleted]

Re: Flutter for Linux

#66

Post by topspin » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 7:53 PM UTC

Interesting that Flutter "Desktop support" exists for macOS and Linux, but not Windows.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#67

Post by Dowwie » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 7:55 PM UTC

see the flutter-rust ffi: https://github.com/brickpop/flutter-rust-ffi

Is anyone considering writing flutter + rust desktop apps in linux?

Re: Flutter for Linux

#68

Post by vetinari » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 7:59 PM UTC

timsneath wrote: post #57

vetinari wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> command-line tools or local utilities. FFI is quite a PITA, though. Soomer or later you will have to interface some platform libraries, and Dart doesn't make that easy.

Curious what platforms you're interested in integrating with. We're experimenting here and looking for feedback. As a fun demonstration of the effectiveness of FFI, you can now build Petzold-style native Windows code with Dart: https://github.com/timsneath/win32/blob/master/example/hello... And here's a 500-line version of the Kilo console text editor built with Dart: https://github.com/timsneath/dart_console/blob/ma…

I'm actually more interested in Linux side of things. That doesn't prevent me from looking how things are done on Windows, of course.

To be fair, last time I looked into dart, the idea of FFI was ports, which was too overcomplicated and undercapable, if you needed something like Gtk or Vulkan. Looking into it now, I see the dart:ffi package is shaping up nicely, so I will have another look at dart again.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#69

Post by ellsthrow » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:01 PM UTC

mnazim wrote: post #21

thomascgalvin wrote: post #19

Does Flutter have a native HTML widget yet? It didn't when I first started poking around with Flutter, and a quick Google doesn't reveal anything first-party.

A number of packages provide webview, which can be used to render html pages.

These still aren't "production" ready yet though unfortunately e.g. they don't currently support keyboard input

Re: Flutter for Linux

#70

Post by haolez » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 8:02 PM UTC

For my usage, Flutter is a no-go for web development for the same reason as Qt: it's just a canvas, so text selection, accessibility, etc doesn't work nicely or at all.