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Is Kotlin Multiplatform Replacing Flutter?

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Re: Is Kotlin Multiplatform Replacing Flutter?

#31

Post by pjmlp »

mdhb wrote: post #25
edarchis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please consider that many of us have been burned before. I've been in business for over 25 years now and I am still supporting several apps built with now forsaken technologies. That includes a web app built with Dart back when Google claimed that its Dart VM would be bundled into every browser. Now, I like Flutter and I like Kotlin. Jetpack Compose is really nice. But if I am starting an app today and in a year or t…

I mean we could take a look at where they are investing their own resources for multi platform development as one way of doing that. Ads is where the overwhelming majority of their money comes from. It’s all Dart (and Flutter specifically on non web platforms). They also just got done rewriting all of Google’s Earths UI in Flutter. It might be my ignorance but what multi platform stuff do they have in production with…

Ads is the reason Dart is still around, back when Dart VM was discontinued, they had just recently migrated from GWT into Angular Dart, and they weren't going to rewrite it yet again.

Had it not been the case, Flutter team would never had reached for Dart.

Re: Is Kotlin Multiplatform Replacing Flutter?

#32

Post by muzani »

We've tried doing both. It's unlikely we'll use KMP/KMM.

1) We weren't happy with the layers in between - there's the cross platform and the 3rd party libs. 2) The exported size was about 30 MB bigger than it could be, mostly related to the previous point.

The main advantage it has over Flutter is that you don't have to learn Dart and Google won't kill it. But Dart is a nice language and it plays better into reactive programming than Kotlin.

Re: Is Kotlin Multiplatform Replacing Flutter?

#33

Post by wruza »

Who may have thought in 2004 that 20 years later you may have to use a specific language and a specific ui library to run gui on different platforms without 500mb runtime and it still stuttered.

Why are we like this? It’s literally 66% more APIs that you need to support since then, everything else is already done. Take GDK/Cairo or Qt abstraction layers, integrate it with platform-specific smooth scrolling api and paint whatever widgets you want efficiently. Even proxying it to html-css would do the trick, although for a price.

Re: Is Kotlin Multiplatform Replacing Flutter?

#34

Post by jamil7 »

zerr wrote: post #17
kbcool wrote: post #9

Since when was Flutter the "go-to solution for cross-platform development"? Maybe for hobbyists but in the corporate space it's still React Native. The problem with Flutter, and this extends even further with KMP is that the scope of your skills is limited to making mobile apps whereas with React Native you are learning and using skills that can apply to a complete stack. KMP is even worse in this regard as they expe…

Unlike RN, Flutter is desktop worthy.

Eh, I was recently contracted onto a native macOS team (Swift), the company had an adjacent desktop team who opted to use Flutter, they had a lot of problems and ended up dropping the project. I don't know the details but there was a lot of weird edge cases they ran into on desktop. They had a mobile app partially in Flutter (different team again) which seemed to be OK, however.

Re: Is Kotlin Multiplatform Replacing Flutter?

#36

Post by bschwindHN »

wg0 wrote: post #22
zerr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike RN, Flutter is desktop worthy.

Hardly. Performance lags. Even after the new rendering engine. Try compiling and then running desk top samples (a mail client, a finance management tool) on macOs and check the amount of jank in animations. Text fields are whole another story. They feel alien in UX on every platform. I can live with that but performance is a deal breaker.

Yep, Flutter performance absolutely _sucks_ on older hardware, which they obviously aren't testing on.

Re: Is Kotlin Multiplatform Replacing Flutter?

#37

Post by mdhb »

pjmlp wrote: post #31
mdhb wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean we could take a look at where they are investing their own resources for multi platform development as one way of doing that. Ads is where the overwhelming majority of their money comes from. It’s all Dart (and Flutter specifically on non web platforms). They also just got done rewriting all of Google’s Earths UI in Flutter. It might be my ignorance but what multi platform stuff do they have in production with…

Ads is the reason Dart is still around, back when Dart VM was discontinued, they had just recently migrated from GWT into Angular Dart, and they weren't going to rewrite it yet again. Had it not been the case, Flutter team would never had reached for Dart.

You say that and yet they continue to use it and are choosing to do so even when it means rewriting huge and complicated bits of software from scratch.

What something from over a decade has to do with its value today I’m not sure.

Re: Is Kotlin Multiplatform Replacing Flutter?

#38

Post by kuschku »

mdhb wrote: post #25
edarchis wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please consider that many of us have been burned before. I've been in business for over 25 years now and I am still supporting several apps built with now forsaken technologies. That includes a web app built with Dart back when Google claimed that its Dart VM would be bundled into every browser. Now, I like Flutter and I like Kotlin. Jetpack Compose is really nice. But if I am starting an app today and in a year or t…

I mean we could take a look at where they are investing their own resources for multi platform development as one way of doing that. Ads is where the overwhelming majority of their money comes from. It’s all Dart (and Flutter specifically on non web platforms). They also just got done rewriting all of Google’s Earths UI in Flutter. It might be my ignorance but what multi platform stuff do they have in production with…

Quoting another user in this thread:

> One datapoint is that Google rewrote their Google Docs app in KMM (which doesn't include UI, that's Compose Multiplatform), replacing their legacy in-house framework. They intend to write more of their apps in it.

https://touchlab.co/KMP-at-google

Re: Is Kotlin Multiplatform Replacing Flutter?

#39

Post by zerr »

pjmlp wrote: post #27
zerr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need to make C++Builder on par with Delphi. Nobody is going to start a new project in Pascal. This and their current licensing make me think that they are more interested in milking existing enterprise costumers rather than acquiring new users.

C++ Builder has been on par with Delphi for years. If anything, I find quite tragic that Microsoft has never managed to make Visual C++ half as good as C++ Builder. The only time that they came closer to it, with C++/CX, some internal devs managed to successfuly riot and replace it with C++/WinRT junk, only to now have fun in Rust/WinRT, and the remaining MS teams rather use C#, React Native, or Webviews, instead of…

I mean on par in cross-platform development. The latest C++Builder only supports Windows. Although, they have switched to Clang recently, so hopefully things will improve, on the tech side at least.
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