Not sure why they are even still using Wayland; if all you want to do is display a full-screen EGL surface, you are better off just talking to libEGL and the kernel atomic DRM yourself.
Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]
71–80 of 202 posts
Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]
#72I really enjoyed writing flutter code when I played with it. Google seems to be backing it strongly and they have lots of great learning videos.
If it ever gets a strong set of cross-platform libraries for doing things like file system access, it's going to be huge. But I'm not even sure that's possible with how locked down the mobile OSes are these days.
Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
An important distinction is Embedded and Real-time. Embedded is the all-encompassing tent, while Real-time is a subset thereof. Embedded includes things with GUIs, like fridges. We're not dealing with 128k of RAM. These can run basic GC'd apps just fine. Pauses really aren't any more of a concern than on desktop, or even less so.
My experience is not this. I've never seen an embedded app with GC. And embedded is usually dog slow processor running at minimum clock, to save power. So pauses are 10X or more the issue re: desktop.
Embedded is a very wide field.
It includes anything from thinks like (home) routers and TV set-top boxes to Embedded devices which have a UI which is not just some simple segment display (e.g. touch screen) are today not seldomly comparable with low end smartphones and tend to not be battery based.
I mean think about how cheap a 1+GHz ARM chip has become today.
Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]
#74Living proof there's at least one (1) flutter user outside Google
Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]
#75We need source for that GTK+ example used to imply GTK+ is broken on Wayland. It could very well be PEBKAC, client-side decorations make being coordinate system aware much more important. If your code assumes everything's in drawable coordinates, it'll work in a top-level window on X11, but may break when Wayland w/CSD shifts things. That slide is potentially quite damaging to GTK+'s reputation, to not even provide a…
GTK doesn't need Sony to damage their reputation. Trying to force CSD on everyone is damaging enough.
The vast majority of app developers use toolkits and don't care where the window decorations come from.
Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]
#76So for some reason they can't just use Android as the base OS /Display Manager and use Flutter for Android so now they have to use X11 or Wayland? They may have their reasons but I skimmed over the PDF and it doesn't address why.
Bringing up Android on a platform is significantly harder than booting up a thin Linux distribution. Android is also a rather fat cow.
The Android version of this would be "Android Things" which would be perfect for this use-case (and some Googles own hardware is running Flutter on Android Things), but that platform has been completely discontinued. So booting up a thin Linux until you get a Flutter canvas just makes way more sense.
Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience is not this. I've never seen an embedded app with GC. And embedded is usually dog slow processor running at minimum clock, to save power. So pauses are 10X or more the issue re: desktop.
> And embedded is usually dog slow processor running at minimum clock, to save power. It used to be like this for a long time, but nowadays the market is moving towards stronger embedded CPUs, either just because they are affordable (raspberry pi), or the power is actually wanted for something (e.g. nvidia jetson for video processing and AI)
Yes I mean I just did some quick price research and I (as a private person) can buy a Quad core Cortex-A53 for just 5.20$... And a Raspbery PI Zero (no WLAN) for 12€.
Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]
#78Dart is easily my favorite programing language. It's the best parts of C# plus real dynamics. The Flutter ecosystem is already above and ahead of React Native , a big part of it is it doesn't have the baggage of npm, Babel and JavaScript. For a friend's side project I've been using Flutter Web and I couldn't be happier with it
It's unfortunate that the web mode uses a canvas and won't work with native browser accessibility stuff. That was the show stopper for me last time I've tried it.
That has been worked on, they do use proper tags instead of a canvas so accessibility now works fine. The next issue is performance / scroll jank though and that will be tough to solve since the rendering model is very different from the web.
Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]
#79I also, independently, started writing an app in Flutter for fun (no experience in mobile/desktop GUI work, several years since I've worked in front-end web). I can give a list of pros/cons that probably overlaps what you've heard: Pros: - The toolkit feels fairly mature and not too hard to parse. I think there's a lot of "this class works with defaults and breaks otherwise" feeling, though the core components are ro…
I would add a few cons to the list (I agree with all the pros):
- Testing can still be improved in my opinion, there's no mutation testing yet and it's still pretty verbose. If you are coming from the JS world, that's clearly superior, if you are coming from the Ruby world however, you will be disappointed a little bit on that level.
- I really don't like the navigation system, it's pretty hard to know the current route and you have to go out of your way if you need to interact with the current route dynamically.
- Webviews are kind-of alpha, which means no tab support, that's a killer for any kind of oauth using webviews.
Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]
#80Great presentation. Also, really not surprising at all. Anyone that has tried getting a sample Flutter app running on a desktop will quickly find that it's shockingly easy and on almost all platforms will "just work" despite being in Alpha. The development experience in Flutter is great too. Anything that can help with that when developing for embedded systems is likely very tempting. I am curious why they went with…
Weston has better support for some things embedded developers care about, e.g. fallback codepaths for multi-plane buffer formats doing the blend in a shader, support for certain deprecated protocols (e.g. ivi-shell) and partial support for using hardware overlay planes for power-conscious compositing. It also doesn't have any of the Gnome dependencies. These are blanket statements; the devil is very often deep in the…
Is the IVI shell deprecated? I work in the automotive and that's what we are currently using.