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?
Flutter desktop isn’t there yet
171–180 of 242 posts
Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a CLA? Do I have to waive ownership of my contributions for my code to be merged? If yes then it's not a community project. Domain ownership has little to do with it. Look at who owns github.com :)
CLAs are always a good idea if one is maintaining an open source project. I'm not going to track down every single contributor who made some small PR perhaps, just to make a license change.
Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any pointers for someone who would love to contribute to Flutter and Dart as an open source contributor? Is there some guideline for what kind of contributions will be considered, areas where contributions are desired, etc?
We've got a guide here that covers some of these areas: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.... For a lot of first-time contributors, improved documentation and added tests are a great way to dip toes into the water. We also have a 'good first contribution' tag on our issues log that might be a source of inspiration: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Ai...
Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would you need for a framework that can’t be implemented as a library? Will we recreate every language from scratch for the next logging, gui lib, web framework as well?
For example, making an AOT compiler. Or adding other features. Or making the implementation more suited to client side apps. There are many things you can do to a language to make it easier for a specific use case. In the extreme, this is what DSLs are. I don't understand why you don't understand that having first class control over a language's development is a useful thing to have.
Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet
#175Another 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.
https://pub.dev/packages/desktop_webview_window
Edit: on 2nd glance perhaps this doesn't embed into the widget tree but is always its own window?
Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet
#176To 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…
I think you give Dart too little credit. Consider the other popular languages of today - Python, JavaScript, C++. Dart is far nicer than those. I'd say it is nicer than Go too. I'm not sure what you mean about boilerplate. The way you create UIs in Dart is one of the main draws of Flutter. Would you rather Android's XML? Or QWidget? The language design is not an issue with Flutter. Flutter's issues are mainly ecosyst…
The abiliy to share the codebase between platforms is much bigger draw rather then the way that the UI is written.
Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Flutter is a community project A quick WHOIS search for flutter.dev and pub.dev domains tells me that this is not really the case.
Is there a CLA? Do I have to waive ownership of my contributions for my code to be merged? If yes then it's not a community project. Domain ownership has little to do with it. Look at who owns github.com :)
It's open source software, developed in the open under a permissive license. You don't have to work for Google to have contributor access or the right to approve others contributions. Google kindly sponsors a fair amount of infrastructure (testing labs, etc.) and pays for a lot of people to work on Flutter. If that doesn't meet your definition of "community", then fair enough -- but the spirit that we work under is that the "Flutter team" is everyone who contributes code.
Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet
#178For 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.
Me too, and I’m surprised how okay with it people seem to be. What are the odds that Google to continue to support the latest platform UI changes? What about five years from now? How much effort is it to get good accessibility support vs native controls, and how likely are developers to do that?
The whole approach seems wholly dependent on Google continuing to give a shit, and as we’re all aware they don’t have the best track record there.
Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Flutter open source?
It's open source the way Chrome is open source: the source is there, but the development is ~100% by Google
[Reference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#:~:text....)
Re: Flutter desktop isn’t there yet
#180Here's my quick criteria for whether I should use a new framework for my app:
- look at other apps that are using that framework, esp. the signature/first class app touted as a consumer by that framework
- how similar is my app to that signature/first class app?
- if my app has similar UX/UI usage then the dev experience will be much smoother/easier/doable
i.e. for React Native: does my app behave like Facebook? If not (say, an action game as an obvious typical non-usage scenario), there be dragons...
for mature, stable frameworks like native mac OSSo what's the signature/first class app for Flutter Desktop?