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Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

plei.one

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Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#51

Post by livinglist »

loic-sharma wrote: post #43

Hello, I'm from the Flutter desktop team. Thank you for the excellent feedback, this is truly invaluable. Here are some updates from our side: 1. Custom context menus - We just added this feature in Flutter 3.7, which was released two weeks ago. Please give this a try and let us know what you think! 2. Multi-window - This is a high priority for the Flutter team, we have several engineers working on this project curre…

Hi there, I have been a happy flutter user for quite some time now, keep up them good work!

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#52

Post by satvikpendem »

izacus wrote: post #19
CharlesW wrote: post #6

For me, Flutter mobile isn't there yet either. I can see where it might be great for games with completely custom UIs, but I find the uncanny valley of pretend native controls a very uncomfortable place to be. Flutter could be a fantastic solution if it supported native controls and used JavaScript. I don't understand why Flutter's creators are so seemingly religious about Dart and reimplementing OS UI capabilities.

Sure, but most common mobile apps ARE completely custom UIs which insist on their own branding and look. The UI designers usually really hate if they have to use standard components and are unable to express themselves. Flutter just recognises that.

Agreed, most apps I use already don't use native controls, like Slack, Discord, Spotify etc, and I don't want my apps to do so either since I have a custom design. I think people on HN think users care about platform UI when we see that most users really don't notice or care.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#53

Post by cbracken »

robust-cactus wrote: post #32

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.

Hey there - Flutter team member here. Support for integrating arbitrary non-flutter views/widgets (referred to as PlatformViews in Flutter terminology) is something we're actively working on at the moment, once we've got them landed, web views and video player support are top of our list in terms of views to add support for. We know people can't wait for this to land, and believe me, I can't wait for it to land either :)

PlatformView support is one of our top desktop priorities this year (along with multi-window support).

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#55

Post by satvikpendem »

mhoad wrote: post #9
preommr wrote: 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 AdWords is made with Dart, specifically AngularDart, not Flutter.

Edit: yes, Google Ads the mobile app is made with Flutter.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#56

Post by zerr »

tekkk wrote: 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…

> so much boilerplate feeling code (Center here, Container there)

That's Flutter, the framework. I like Dart and I wish some conventional imperative Qt/Delphi-like GUI toolkit was available for it.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#57

Post by mhoad »

livinglist wrote: post #51
loic-sharma wrote: post #43

Hello, I'm from the Flutter desktop team. Thank you for the excellent feedback, this is truly invaluable. Here are some updates from our side: 1. Custom context menus - We just added this feature in Flutter 3.7, which was released two weeks ago. Please give this a try and let us know what you think! 2. Multi-window - This is a high priority for the Flutter team, we have several engineers working on this project curre…

Hi there, I have been a happy flutter user for quite some time now, keep up them good work!

Same, contrary to some of the comments here I’ve had nothing but great experiences coming from a purely web background previously.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#58

Post by kodah »

hbn wrote: post #17

The more "solutions" that are developed for desktop + mobile cross-platform applications, the more I see highlighted how different the paradigms are, and how the streams really shouldn't be crossed. They're both UIs viewed on a screen that you interact with by pointing and clicking, but the similarities end there. The entire output of this cross-platform effort has been awkward applications that run everywhere but fe…

Fully native isn't especially realistic. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, general purpose tooling written by a small team can't support multiple native UIs.

What often works for me is something like Wails, but it has its limitations. For instance there's no multi-window functionality there either, and while the new Wails supports more OS integrations there's still some aspects that need improvement to compete with native UI.

I'd love to try Flutter, but frankly I don't want to write "backend-ish" code in Dart. There's some projects to be able to build UIs in Flutter and have processing done by a separate language that all gets bundled as one, but they're mostly hobby projects.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#59

Post by satvikpendem »

friedman23 wrote: post #7
lpa22 wrote: post #2

i am greatful for Flutter if only to motivate the React Native team

One single platform for cross platform development is enough motivation and react native has improved a lot in the past year. The entire concept of developing the same app multiple times for different platforms is just so mind numbingly dumb. 3x the engineering team, 3 different platforms with all their different idiosyncrasies. The impossibility of maintaining feature parity across all three platforms. 3x the testin…

Indeed, as a solo developer, Flutter is a godsend to be competitive with others in the market who already have integrations with a bunch of platforms.

Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet

#60

Post by olliej »

nicoburns wrote: post #46
satvikpendem wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've answered why Dart many times. It's a language that fits their needs, since it has JIT, AOT, compilation to JS and now WASM. Back then there weren't many languages that could do all that, and even today there aren't many. Kotlin (and other JVM languages) and TypeScript (and other compile-to-JS-only languages) are already out since they are not AOT, only JIT even now. More importantly, it was a Google language…

> since Apple does not allow JITted code apparently (not sure how React Native gets around this then) With React Native you have two options. Use Apple's own JavaScriptCore engine which has special JIT permissions, or use Meta's Hermes engine which runs as a bytecode interpreter. In either case you can always drop down to native code (Swift/Objective-C (iOS), Kotlin/Java (android), or C/C++ (any platform)) which can…

No, the ability to JIT is not per framework (I'm unsure how that would work?), it's per process. Using JSC doesn't give you a JIT - now the JSC interpreter is very fast, so it's possible claims that they "need JIT" are incorrect (back when I worked on JSC it was a common belief from people that the JITs were magic fairy dust, and so would come in to anything with a data-less assumption that a JIT was needed), it's also possible that "react native" is using wkwebview in which case the content would be running in a separate web content process with a jit.
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