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Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

plei.one

31–40 of 242 posts

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#31
post #23

To me as someone who recently got into Flutter to make a side-project (mobile game) the most glaring problem isn't the lack of ecosystem or little UI issues the author mentions but the language itself. You had a green field to make the best programming language for creating UIs and you made Dart? Like what. I don't have particular issue with the heavy OOP paradigm but the fact you have to write so much boilerplate fe…

They didn’t create Dart for UI. It was dead and they shoehorned it into Flutter.

Considering that Dart was made to run in browsers, they did in fact.

The APIs the OP are complaining about are Flutter's not Dart's. Flutter tried to do a vdom-like thing that also included styling on top of regular function call syntax and it is... what it is.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#33
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry, but not supporting multiple windows (not monitors!) in a single process, and not supporting bog-standard desktop features like context menus, rightfully qualifies as “not there yet”.

It really depends on what the app you're developing requires. My app is just a few buttons for inputting data. I don't need context menus, multiple monitors or text selection. Thanks for the downvote though.

The fact that it happens to fit your limited needs doesn’t mean that it’s suitable for general desktop development.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#34
post #23

To me as someone who recently got into Flutter to make a side-project (mobile game) the most glaring problem isn't the lack of ecosystem or little UI issues the author mentions but the language itself. You had a green field to make the best programming language for creating UIs and you made Dart? Like what. I don't have particular issue with the heavy OOP paradigm but the fact you have to write so much boilerplate fe…

They didn’t create Dart for UI. It was dead and they shoehorned it into Flutter.

To be fair it’s not a bad choice for UI: supporting both AOT and JIT speeds up the dev loop and allows compiled performance + hot reloading in dev, which is good for UI development.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#35
post #9
post #5

Flutter is going to be 5 years old soon. It's not even the leading solution for cross-platform development for mobile let alone desktop. It's great to be positive and supportive but realistically, if someone had to bet months of dev work on building something non-trivial - would they really choose flutter?

It’s hardly some toy SDK that is only suitable for MVPs. Google’s single biggest money maker Ads is built with it. It’s hardly a Google specific thing either there are a number of mega sized players also strongly betting on it for some fairly mission critical stuff if I understood correctly.

You realize that even Google doesn’t use Flutter in their cross platform consumer apps.

https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/

And just because “mega sized players” are betting on it has never stopped Google from abandoning projects before.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#36
post #9
post #5

Flutter is going to be 5 years old soon. It's not even the leading solution for cross-platform development for mobile let alone desktop. It's great to be positive and supportive but realistically, if someone had to bet months of dev work on building something non-trivial - would they really choose flutter?

It’s hardly some toy SDK that is only suitable for MVPs. Google’s single biggest money maker Ads is built with it. It’s hardly a Google specific thing either there are a number of mega sized players also strongly betting on it for some fairly mission critical stuff if I understood correctly.

> Google’s single biggest money maker Ads is built with it

You mean Google Adwords right, the admin panel? I can't see any evidence of that, nor is it listed at https://flutter.dev/showcase, where you get this from?

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#37

Another one, desktop webviews don't exist either. Everyone does something custom right now and there's an epic vent fest in one of their GitHub issues. This causes about 1 new package to get released every few months too that tries to address it.

This. This was one of the reasons we ended up abandoning Flutter (the state of text editing was the other, super_editor notwithstanding).

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#40

Multiple windows is on the roadmap and high priority. For me the best use of desktop is testing mobile apps without having to use my phone or an emulator. It works really well.

That’s because the Android emulator sucks for development.

There has never been an iOS “emulator” for development. When you built your code to test on the desktop, it was compiled to x86 and used x86 version of the iOS framework.

Of course now that Macs use ARM chips, it’s a moot point.

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