Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 86 posts

Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1

#11

Post by mutagen »

kamura wrote: post #8

As someone who has spent some time inside the Windows 10 environment working on UWP applications, I always thought that Xamarin would someday be my goto whenever I have the opportunity to dive into Mobile development. I am comfortable with C# and I have always felt happy writing in XAML. But looking into Flutter, I think it's undeniable how smart this project truly was. Even if it isn't backed by a popular programmin…

Have you looked at Uno?

http://platform.uno/

C# & XAML UWP layer with Xamarin for mobile. The company behind it has been using for a few years to produce apps and recently open sourced it. I'm intrigued and weighing it against Flutter for my next bit of mobile experimentations.

Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1

#12

Post by rhodysurf »

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #5

Unfortunately, I kind of feel torn: On one hand, I love flutter as a concept[1]. It removes a lot of the baroque from mobile development (no need for the whole RecyclerViewer construction for every list! No Fragments! Doesn't require Android Studio to start working!) but I hate the language (dart). After using Kotlin (let alone Rust), It feels like moving back to Java (no non-nullable types) and in some ways it's act…

Agree the language is the worst part. Honestly if Dart has extensions like Swift and Kotlin, and rust (I think) I would be satisfied though.

Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1

#13

Post by k__ »

pplante wrote: post #4

I've been using Flutter for a few months now, and have not felt this productive in years. Being able to iterate so quickly on real or virtual devices has changed how I design and development a UI. I can set out with a mock-up and almost immediately start to feel why it isn't perfect and just use it until the feel is right. The productivity bonuses are sometimes hard to explain to people who haven't yet tried Flutter…

Sounds like Expo to me.

How does it handle native APIs? Like React-Native (you have to write bridges in ObjC/Java) or like NativeScript (you can simply access all native APIs via JS)

Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1

#14

Post by k__ »

eksemplar wrote: post #6
greenhouse_gas wrote: post #5

Unfortunately, I kind of feel torn: On one hand, I love flutter as a concept[1]. It removes a lot of the baroque from mobile development (no need for the whole RecyclerViewer construction for every list! No Fragments! Doesn't require Android Studio to start working!) but I hate the language (dart). After using Kotlin (let alone Rust), It feels like moving back to Java (no non-nullable types) and in some ways it's act…

I have a different view on it, I actually like Dart. I like the strong types and how the language is more suited for enterprise development than both typescript and JavaScript. There is the added benefit of being able to reuse assets from your mobile app in AngularDart, which I suspect may see an increase in use along with flutter. I’m not coming from Kotlin or rust though, but a .net core backend with JavaScript on…

Maybe Dart is simply better than C#/Java but worse than Kotlin?

Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1

#15

Post by mythz »

rhodysurf wrote: post #12
greenhouse_gas wrote: post #5

Unfortunately, I kind of feel torn: On one hand, I love flutter as a concept[1]. It removes a lot of the baroque from mobile development (no need for the whole RecyclerViewer construction for every list! No Fragments! Doesn't require Android Studio to start working!) but I hate the language (dart). After using Kotlin (let alone Rust), It feels like moving back to Java (no non-nullable types) and in some ways it's act…

Agree the language is the worst part. Honestly if Dart has extensions like Swift and Kotlin, and rust (I think) I would be satisfied though.

Extensions is also my #1 most missed language feature! Wasn't possible before when Dart was dynamically typed, but perhaps now with Dart 2's strong mode we'll see it in future.

Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1

#16

Post by rhodysurf »

k__ wrote: post #13
pplante wrote: post #4

I've been using Flutter for a few months now, and have not felt this productive in years. Being able to iterate so quickly on real or virtual devices has changed how I design and development a UI. I can set out with a mock-up and almost immediately start to feel why it isn't perfect and just use it until the feel is right. The productivity bonuses are sometimes hard to explain to people who haven't yet tried Flutter…

Sounds like Expo to me. How does it handle native APIs? Like React-Native (you have to write bridges in ObjC/Java) or like NativeScript (you can simply access all native APIs via JS)

Asynchronous bridges

Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1

#17

Post by krzat »

mutagen wrote: post #11
kamura wrote: post #8

As someone who has spent some time inside the Windows 10 environment working on UWP applications, I always thought that Xamarin would someday be my goto whenever I have the opportunity to dive into Mobile development. I am comfortable with C# and I have always felt happy writing in XAML. But looking into Flutter, I think it's undeniable how smart this project truly was. Even if it isn't backed by a popular programmin…

Have you looked at Uno? http://platform.uno/ C# & XAML UWP layer with Xamarin for mobile. The company behind it has been using for a few years to produce apps and recently open sourced it. I'm intrigued and weighing it against Flutter for my next bit of mobile experimentations.

This thing seems to be a layered cake of leaky abstractions. Flutter is actually the opposite.

Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1

#18

Post by mixedCase »

eksemplar wrote: post #6
greenhouse_gas wrote: post #5

Unfortunately, I kind of feel torn: On one hand, I love flutter as a concept[1]. It removes a lot of the baroque from mobile development (no need for the whole RecyclerViewer construction for every list! No Fragments! Doesn't require Android Studio to start working!) but I hate the language (dart). After using Kotlin (let alone Rust), It feels like moving back to Java (no non-nullable types) and in some ways it's act…

I have a different view on it, I actually like Dart. I like the strong types and how the language is more suited for enterprise development than both typescript and JavaScript. There is the added benefit of being able to reuse assets from your mobile app in AngularDart, which I suspect may see an increase in use along with flutter. I’m not coming from Kotlin or rust though, but a .net core backend with JavaScript on…

>is more suited for enterprise development than both typescript and JavaScript.

What makes you think this given the library and tooling situation? Is this strictly a "worse is better" thing where lacking modern language features is a plus (at which point I'd argue for Java) or is there a Dart feature that makes you think it's actually an improvement over TypeScript, Kotlin, .NET Core (both C# and F#) or Rust (just to avoid adding more languages to what you mentioned) for enterprise development?

I'm frankly astonished at seeing how something that I see as an extremely clear step backwards as far as languages go is getting so much traction; not sure if it's just because Flutter is that good a tool (in which case I'd think we should be aiming to make the native core available to other languages) that people are willing to root for the whole package or if there's something else.

Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1

#19

Post by hliyan »

mythz wrote: post #9

This release follows Airbnb posts describing their deep experience in React Native and why they ended up abandoning it: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-nativ... Based on the issues they've had with React Native [1] I believe they would've had a better experience with Dart and Flutter which also has a fast iterative dev experience with a productive language that lets you build both iOS and Andro…

> Facebook only cares about resolving their own issues

One could argue that Google suffers from this weakness as well.

Re: Announcing Flutter Release Preview 1

#20

Post by whatever_dude »

mythz wrote: post #9

This release follows Airbnb posts describing their deep experience in React Native and why they ended up abandoning it: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-nativ... Based on the issues they've had with React Native [1] I believe they would've had a better experience with Dart and Flutter which also has a fast iterative dev experience with a productive language that lets you build both iOS and Andro…

> it's just poorly resourced and Facebook only cares about resolving their own issues.

I'm not sure this is _the_ cause for anything, but it's definitely something that happens. I've seen obvious bugs lingering forgotten on RN just because it's not something they're interested in resolving.

And before someone mentions "open source" some of those are deep structural problems that not anyone can just come and fix since they'd have side effects all over the code base. I've also seen actual fixes lingering for months until someone would decide to review or approve it.

Post reply on HN