Flutter desktop shells

great news :) Flutter/Dart was a joy for me to code in. As a backend engineer I could pretty much skip all nonsense and just build a simple Android/iOS app in a matter of days. I didn't even have to use Android Studio, built and deploy my app straight from the terminal via CLI.

I have looked at multiple different solutions how to hack flutter to run on desktop but didn't want to invest my time in them as they would probably crash in weird scenarios. This will make things so much easier! modern tooling + no electron = win for both developers and users.

You could say the same about Objective C, and to a lesser extent Swift. While I respect your opinion, and somewhat agree on it being a weird choice to use Dart, I think there is value in learning it iff it becomes the ubiquitous way to write apps for mobile.

I've tried dart back in the Angular 2 beta days with Angular Dart and after using it I have the exact opposite feeling about it.

It's a thing that solved a lot of very real problems that are still halfassed by NPM and Node ecosystem - package manager, build system, tooling around it - it was all a step above the quality of TypeScript/NPM/JS. Saner object semantics, good standard library, good tooling - it just got me to solving the problems I had. DOM wrappers it had were very nice, came with their own wrappers for Observable events (from standard library). They had proper async/await implementation working waay before TS.

Dart feels like a better TypeScript and for me the learning curve was really low.

One issue I had with it was using Dartium to debug the code - Chromium build that ran Dart VM naively to avoid transpiling to JS all the time - it was buggy as hell back then. Supposedly the dev compiler for JS is fast enough now that this isn't an issue - and in the case of Flutter you're running Dart natively so it's irrelevant.

I'm looking forward to doing a new project in Flutter this weekend - I've played with a hello world app when it was in beta and I was very impressed with the dev experience - hopefully it lives up to it in practice.

I want to link to Revery - a native, cross-platform GUI library written in Reason/OCaml.

It brings React's view=function(state) model to native applications, along with CSS box model and Flexbox. It has the developer ergonomics of Electron, but without the need for its heavy runtime.

It is still under development and I'm looking forward to playing with it next time I try writing a GUI app.

https://github.com/revery-ui/revery

I was just about to write more or less the same comment before I decided to refresh the page.

I just started coding as if I was working with a version of Typescript.

I only Google from time to time for the standard library docs.