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Flutter 3

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Re: Flutter 3

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can wrap the React Native Web target in Tauri or Electron for Linux. There's also https://github.com/valence-native/valence-native that can use either wxWidgets or Qt. All in all it's better than the current Flutter web / desktop implementation.

> There's also https://github.com/valence-native/valence-native that uses Qt. There's been more than a year without a commit in this project, I'm not going to say it's abandoned yet but that's not that far off I guess, good luck with the issues you'll encounter. > You can wrap the React Native Web target in Tauri or Electron for Linux. That's one of the only realistic solution for now in my opinion.

> There's been more than a year without a commit in this project, I'm not going to say it's abandoned yet but that's not that far off I guess, good luck with the issues you'll encounter.

Or it's stable? Look at the codebase, it's a pretty dead simple bridge. Make your app open source and all those Linux devs you're supporting can help you out!

> That's one of the only realistic solution for now in my opinion.

Yup, and you get it for free with if you build your app with RN and React Native Web.

Re: Flutter 3

#362
post #59

Earlier 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.

They just launched cross-platform desktop support today. Who would be using it for desktop apps like Electron?

It has been out for a serious while though, just in a very high quality beta. I've personally been using it just fine, though for nothing too complicated

Re: Flutter 3

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> welcome to blinking cursor that consumes 5-15% CPU in idle. Citation? Flutter draws its own UI but game engines do that too. All code in flutter compiles down to native code. > React native has less performance issues, since it uses native toolkit. In theory.

>Citation?

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/59327

This has been a long-standing issue that has completely ruled out Flutter for us. E.g, the Flutterfolio idle login screen uses 14% CPU on my Mac. For a while it sounded like Google was saying that it can't be fixed. But I think they have done some work to address this issue. I'll be very interested in finding out whether it has been fixed in Flutter 3.

Re: Flutter 3

#364
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really want cross platform on Android and iOS. Windows and MacOS are nice to have, why not?

Who is “we”? As a user I want highly polished, efficient apps. That pretty much rules out anything built with a cross platform toolkit. (Games are a major exception.) As a developer, I personally want to make those kinds of programs too. I periodically check into the state of the cross platform toolkits and frankly they really aren’t any better than they were a decade ago. Separating out a UI layer that is unique in…

I think this assumption that cross platform UI solutions can’t be extremely fast is a very strange one.

There have been some bad efforts at this in the past which is maybe how you arrived at the conclusion but the concept of Flutter is pretty straightforward and not dissimilar to games in some sense where you just need to push pixels to a screen.

They even have a some game engineers who used to work at EA on the team. One even wrote a popular book on it https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

Like in short, Flutter is going to be fine. It compiles to native code that just needs to push pixels to a screen, it has a bunch of smart people on it and some extremely heavy incentives to get this right.

Re: Flutter 3

#365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Very limited anecdotal evidence: about the same as native apps on my android phone. (measured by counting out loud and trying some random apps)

Re: Flutter 3

#366

People are talking about a better developer experience, but hardly anyone is talking about the user experience with apps built with this tech. I don't feel it's great, especially on older devices. Take google pay, a showcase flutter app. It's a laggy mess on an iPhone SE 2016, whereas the "old" google pay ran perfectly fine. On top of that, many google apps I use these days will just freeze and stop accepting touch i…

Googler, opinions are my own.

Interesting thread from a year ago may interest you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26333973 (it's a flutter lead talking about Google pay).

I'd be interested to know how much the team tests with an iphone that old.

Re: Flutter 3

#367

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,…

> Dart isn't horrible

Dart is horrible and the sole reason i don't touch Flutter

Re: Flutter 3

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's also https://github.com/valence-native/valence-native that uses Qt. There's been more than a year without a commit in this project, I'm not going to say it's abandoned yet but that's not that far off I guess, good luck with the issues you'll encounter. > You can wrap the React Native Web target in Tauri or Electron for Linux. That's one of the only realistic solution for now in my opinion.

> There's been more than a year without a commit in this project, I'm not going to say it's abandoned yet but that's not that far off I guess, good luck with the issues you'll encounter. Or it's stable? Look at the codebase, it's a pretty dead simple bridge. Make your app open source and all those Linux devs you're supporting can help you out! > That's one of the only realistic solution for now in my opinion. Yup, an…

> Or it's stable? Look at the codebase, it's a pretty dead simple bridge. Make your app open source and all those Linux devs you're supporting can help you out!

Even the simplest bridge needs upgrades, unless you want to be stuck with react 16.

> Yup, and you get it for free with if you build your app with RN and React Native Web.

That's better than nothing I'd say yeah. That's kind of the issue with react native, you need platform-specific rendering code and since companies don't really care that much about linux desktop it's not really there.

Re: Flutter 3

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flutter is the only realistic option for true cross platform UIs that run everywhere. I understand that argument but 100% disagree. The web is the cross platform that runs everywhere (as in in a browser or webview). True it has many issues and some forms of it (electron) are not ideal for some use case but I believe it’s a better platform than flutter in almost every way. You say “true” cross platform and could arg…

I came here to say this too. Build your app as a website, then just use a simple browser window of an app that loads your site. Then you only develop in one place, and have nothing to compile or build. Hardly ever have to update your "app" builds even. This won't replace every app of course depending on what you're trying to do and if it requires specific hardware features, but I'd say about 99% of apps don't need to…

This is also how you lose customers.

Re: Flutter 3

#370
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really want cross platform on Android and iOS. Windows and MacOS are nice to have, why not?

Who is “we”? As a user I want highly polished, efficient apps. That pretty much rules out anything built with a cross platform toolkit. (Games are a major exception.) As a developer, I personally want to make those kinds of programs too. I periodically check into the state of the cross platform toolkits and frankly they really aren’t any better than they were a decade ago. Separating out a UI layer that is unique in…

As a user, I want native apps with some added value compared to web apps. I don't actually care about "polished", 60fps and things like that. So we are in a different camps.
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