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Flutter 3.47

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Re: Flutter 3.47

#101

Post by theanonymousone »

skeledrew wrote: post #45
theanonymousone wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using Flet? If yes do you think it's mature enough and has a potential to stay long "in the game"?

I use Flet in a few projects. It's still somewhat young and the declarative move caused a few issues (for me, mainly because I wasn't familiar with the pattern), but generally I'd say it's stable, feature-complete and the maintainer seems to be in it for the long haul. Also it fills a critical gap that nothing else does, binding a decent UI framework and cross-platform capability to a language with an extremely large…

Thanks. And do you know what it has to do with Flutter these days actually? There is barely any mention of Flutter in the website etc :/

Re: Flutter 3.47

#102

Post by meerita »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #92
meerita wrote: post #81

I still prefer React Native with Expo over Flutter, mostly for practical reasons: * Language and hiring: TypeScript has a much larger developer pool. Dart is a solid language, but finding experienced Flutter engineers is harder. * Platform model: React Native maps much more naturally to native platform concepts. Flutter owns much more of the rendering stack, which is powerful, but also creates another abstraction lay…

You should try Dart/Flutter again, they've improved a lot. - Dart. It's richer than JS/TS with stronger type safety, and seems purpose-built for UI. Fewer Dart developers than JS, but I'd argue those JS developers cannot be immediately effective coding React Native (Expo) anyway. - Emulated components vs. real native components. For multi-platform apps, this is actually desirable. These kinds of apps have their own d…

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Re: Flutter 3.47

#103

Post by meerita »

thelollies wrote: post #96
meerita wrote: post #81

I still prefer React Native with Expo over Flutter, mostly for practical reasons: * Language and hiring: TypeScript has a much larger developer pool. Dart is a solid language, but finding experienced Flutter engineers is harder. * Platform model: React Native maps much more naturally to native platform concepts. Flutter owns much more of the rendering stack, which is powerful, but also creates another abstraction lay…

Funny to see speed in there, my experience is the opposite. Im a very happy Flutter dev and it's always been odd to see so much negative sentiment around it when there are public discussions.

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Re: Flutter 3.47

#104

Post by meerita »

sevenzero wrote: post #94
meerita wrote: post #81

I still prefer React Native with Expo over Flutter, mostly for practical reasons: * Language and hiring: TypeScript has a much larger developer pool. Dart is a solid language, but finding experienced Flutter engineers is harder. * Platform model: React Native maps much more naturally to native platform concepts. Flutter owns much more of the rendering stack, which is powerful, but also creates another abstraction lay…

>real native components Since when does React Native use real native components? Last time I've checked it wasn't capable of doing ANYTHING with my phones NFC scanner or native camera... With flutter I can just build a Kotlin component and integrate it easily into my app. Also Flutters performance is extremely good, I dont know what you are on about. Our app is used on extremely old phones and has great performance.…

You're mixing UI components with platform APIs. React Native does use native platform-backed views. NFC and camera access are separate concerns. If an API isn't exposed, you can write the native Swift/Kotlin module and bridge it, just like you would integrate native code into Flutter. Camera support also already exists in Expo.

Re: Flutter 3.47

#105

Post by meerita »

palata wrote: post #87
meerita wrote: post #81

I still prefer React Native with Expo over Flutter, mostly for practical reasons: * Language and hiring: TypeScript has a much larger developer pool. Dart is a solid language, but finding experienced Flutter engineers is harder. * Platform model: React Native maps much more naturally to native platform concepts. Flutter owns much more of the rendering stack, which is powerful, but also creates another abstraction lay…

Out of curiosity, do you have any experience with Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform? I would like to know how that compares.

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Re: Flutter 3.47

#106

Post by hypendev »

meerita wrote: post #81

I still prefer React Native with Expo over Flutter, mostly for practical reasons: * Language and hiring: TypeScript has a much larger developer pool. Dart is a solid language, but finding experienced Flutter engineers is harder. * Platform model: React Native maps much more naturally to native platform concepts. Flutter owns much more of the rendering stack, which is powerful, but also creates another abstraction lay…

As someone who used all these frameworks professionally for years, I highly agree. Although, I do not prefer Expo due to it's highly annoying build system and dependency hell, but React Native itself in that case. While I understand Google wants a horse in this race, Flutter doesn't feel like a horse to bet on.

- Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java and Javascript and turned them into a language. Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use.

- While there is no Skia anymore, the whole custom rendering of Flutter often caused more trouble than not, from the UI implementation itself all the way to specific low-end chipsets not being supported.

- Ecosystem propagates these insane architectures that don't make much sense and are made to either print apps as fast as possible or to emulate some Clean Code like behavior.

- Web still feels terrible to use, even after all these years.

Since I'm not happy with any of these, I've even taken upon writing a framework of my own that renders into native UI and works with any language (gonna shill it here https://hypen.space). It was inspired directly by years of working with mobile and experiencing the pains of crossplatform development such as Flutter and Expo. We can do better than these!

Re: Flutter 3.47

#107

Post by [deleted] »

hypendev wrote: post #106
meerita wrote: post #81

I still prefer React Native with Expo over Flutter, mostly for practical reasons: * Language and hiring: TypeScript has a much larger developer pool. Dart is a solid language, but finding experienced Flutter engineers is harder. * Platform model: React Native maps much more naturally to native platform concepts. Flutter owns much more of the rendering stack, which is powerful, but also creates another abstraction lay…

As someone who used all these frameworks professionally for years, I highly agree. Although, I do not prefer Expo due to it's highly annoying build system and dependency hell, but React Native itself in that case. While I understand Google wants a horse in this race, Flutter doesn't feel like a horse to bet on. - Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java…

[deleted]

Re: Flutter 3.47

#108

Post by spwa4 »

pjmlp wrote: post #68
skybrian wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, Adwords migrated from GWT to Dart. (And eventually I followed.) At one point, Dart moved from the Chrome division to the Adwords division. And Adwords alone can fund a team to do developer tools for them. Then, Flutter came a bit later. It's been over a decade since then, though, and I'm out of touch now.

In fact AdWords is the reason Dart was still around when Flutter came to be.

They still maintaining it's predecessor that the Google "core properties" ran on: Closure (not Clojure), the javascript compiler. It's an evolution of the hack that Gmail initially was built on.

Re: Flutter 3.47

#109

Post by jcollins »

wwdrew wrote: post #77
TheChaplain wrote: post #73

Are Flutter and React Native still viable choices today? I get the impression that more are going for native mobile, KMP or PWA.

I’ve been a React Native developer for 8 years, I’ve written many apps with it professionally and personally. Until recently, I would have recommended it wholeheartedly. This weekend I had an idea I set out to experiment with: if I have an existing React Native app, how much effort would it take an LLM to rewrite it into genuinely native apps. My idea being I no longer need to write cross-platform code and pay the in…

I really believe this is the way forward, native platform UI built by AI.

I'm trying it now with an app and so far it's working really well. I build what I can cross platform, the non-ui stuff, then have AI build the UI for each platform.

It even implemented native low-level graphics on each platform: metal, vulkan, and d3d12. It builds SwiftUI on Apple platforms, WinUI3 on Windows, GTK4 on Linux, Compose on Android. The cross platform stuff is Zig with a C ABI.

And yeah, it's a bit terrifying how fast you can iterate. I've built for all these platforms in about a month. It would have taken at least a year, maybe more before. I haven't even optimized the process by having AI agents follow my lead automatically, so as I finish features on the primary platform they could start building the others by watching. Requires some setup I haven't tackled yet (VMs for all platforms with agents waiting).

Re: Flutter 3.47

#110

Post by sevenzero »

meerita wrote: post #104
sevenzero wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>real native components Since when does React Native use real native components? Last time I've checked it wasn't capable of doing ANYTHING with my phones NFC scanner or native camera... With flutter I can just build a Kotlin component and integrate it easily into my app. Also Flutters performance is extremely good, I dont know what you are on about. Our app is used on extremely old phones and has great performance.…

You're mixing UI components with platform APIs. React Native does use native platform-backed views. NFC and camera access are separate concerns. If an API isn't exposed, you can write the native Swift/Kotlin module and bridge it, just like you would integrate native code into Flutter. Camera support also already exists in Expo.

I see, thanks for clarifying!
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