Despite many maturity issues in practice Flutter is the only realistic option for true cross platform UIs that run everywhere. Apart from Qt , but the licensing issue is a hindrance. And yes, the web backend isn't ideal, but it will improve over time. I just wish Google had built Flutter on a low level core that isn't tied to Dart, so it would be usable from other languages. Dart isn't horrible and is getting better,…
I keep hearing this, but none of the cross platform apps I run use Flutter. It's all Electron and Qt. I don't think I've ever seen Flutter in the wild.
Flutter 3
321–330 of 453 posts
Re: Flutter 3
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I just wish Google had built Flutter on a low level core that isn't tied to Dart, so it would be usable from other languages." Exactly. Dart is a deal-breaker. I was tasked with choosing a cross-platform development solution, and rejected Flutter because nobody at my company (including me) knows Dart or has time to learn it. Nor would any contractors we were likely to find know it. After quite a bit of research on o…
Flutter and Dart seemed to have been internal tools built by engineers looking for an interesting project to spend their time on while at Google. Kotlin swelled up around the limitations of Java 8 in outside organizations and took over the ecosystem so Android devs could be productive while Google was fighting with Oracle
Java was already open-source at the time so the court fight’s outcome was meaningless from the view of what language to choose.
And Android would have been much better off if they didn’t fork the whole ecosystem and just used OpenJDK, perhaps with an added low-memory GC.
Re: Flutter 3
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's pretty short-sighted. Dart is hardly an esoteric/niche language like Haskell or Futhark, anyone familiar with Java/Javascript/TypeScript should be able to pick it up in a day or so. Flutter's performance issues, on the other hand, is a separate story.
> Flutter's performance issues, on the other hand, is a separate story. Can you expand on that? I know react native has performance issues but does Flutter have it too? Why?
React native has less performance issues, since it uses native toolkit.
Flutter draws whole ui by itself: welcome to blinking cursor that consumes 5-15% CPU in idle.
Re: Flutter 3
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has a Skia target (in Microsoft.Maui.Graphics) which is theoretically very similar to how Flutter does UI.
Did they give up on GTK? I remember Suse Linux Enterprise in particular shipped with a bunch of nice .NET/GTK apps that seemed to work well.
They did. Gtk# hasn't seen updates in ages.
Re: Flutter 3
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apart from Qt, but the licensing issue is a hindrance Qt is LGPLv3, which is really a problem only if you plan to develop embedded software. Sure, there are a few GPL v3 modules here and there, but it's mostly very specific stuff (virtual keyboards, Wayland compositors, ...)
How is it not a problem if you want to sell closed-source software? I guess you can dynamically link desktop applications (although I'm not sure how this works in Apple's Mac app store), but you can't do that with mobile apps.
If you to sell closed-source software be a good boy/girl and give part of the money pile to Qt developers, so that they keep working on Qt.
Re: Flutter 3
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep hearing this, but none of the cross platform apps I run use Flutter. It's all Electron and Qt. I don't think I've ever seen Flutter in the wild.
I have a few apps out there and you can’t tell them apart from native. They are insanely snappy. Flutter is the bomb.
How’s the startup time?
Re: Flutter 3
#327We have a react native app and sometimes it fails to build. We go to lunch, and come back no code change now it builds. I'm just sick of the NPM/Javascript bullshit. Does Flutter avoid all of these kinds of issues? I'm this close to scrapping the whole thing.
I worked with React Native for 3 years before jumping over to Flutter and this was the biggest reason why I made the switch. Its exponentially better on Flutter. The only time builds break for the team are when we made a code change that broke it. Its consistent and non-flaky (looking at you RN). Not that you won't run into the occasional issue but with React Native easily 20% of my time developing was "this just sto…
This has been my experience with RN too (admittedly, a few years back). So much time wasted on troubleshooting random glitches that occur for seemingly unrelated reason. Some minor library version update? Boom, your breakpoints no longer work. Why? Noone knows. The "turn it off, turn it on" approach seems to be the go-to fix in this environment. And there's always another surprise around the corner.
I can't really contrast it with Flutter, because I only toyed with it a little bit, but at least the docs were of much better quality - and this being a few years back as I said, the fact that Flutter was the newer framework (and still provided better quality at least in this area) was even more pronounced.
Re: Flutter 3
#328What are big and highly used apps that use Flutter?
I believe the Sonos mobile app is Flutter.
Re: Flutter 3
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still maintain that Flutter Web is not production ready. It could have a nice niche, like games. But for real apps, it's just not as good as web. They are still re-implementing things that have existed in the web for ages, and are not going to be able to keep up. It's basically good for an applet style usage IMO. I'll keep trying it out, I think Flutter is pretty great for mobile, even desktop, but every time I use…
FWIW I kind of agree and I’m a big fan of both Flutter and the web in general. There are a couple of web platform technologies that I think are going to take Flutter web from ok to great in the next year or two including. WASM Garbage Collection is going to allow them to move from compiling to JS to WASM. They have already built a WASM compiler ready to go when it lands. WebGPU is another obvious one. Flutter is by d…
Isn’t Dart a very JS-like language? I really don’t believe that compiling to JS would cause any bottlenecks at all, like compiling Java to JS is also possible with Google’s own Closure compiler which produces crazy fast JS output.
Sure, JS is not a good compilation target but if you have a sufficiently similar language it is not too hard, and with the man-hours spent on JS JIT-compilers these won’t be slow at all.
Though surely the render codepath could use wasm, but that could be written natively as well without a need for GC.
As for WebGPU, I don’t think a web app would be okay with the latency of compiling shaders. Not sure whether it will be needed, or if it can be cached but it is not a trivial win either.
Re: Flutter 3
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, I'm not trashing the language, because I know nothing about it. Our whole dev team is C/C++, with random people who know Python and a few other things. I'm the only one who knows Swift. They're bright people and not hostile toward new ideas, but they're already overtaxed and can't cater to an outlier project written in a language no one knows and built on a framework no one knows.
Quoted post unavailable.
I really dislike C and C++, but I think your comment is needlessly hostile and insulting to C and C++ developers, and it doesn't add anything of value to this discussion. Please consider rewriting or deleting it.