Live data from Hacker News

We're forking Flutter

flutterfoundation.dev

121–130 of 748 posts

Re: We're forking Flutter

#121

Back when I worked on GWT, we had trouble accepting outside contributions because the team had a mandate to support Googlers. That is, much like other libraries and tools at Google, changes could not break google3. This means testing patches against google3 and either changing the patch, or fixing whatever code used it, and these are tasks that no outsider can do. Shepherding these patches is no fun when you have you…

What is google3?

Google's monorepo of closed source code.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#122

> That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000. Doing a little bit of division, that means that every single member of the Flutter team is responsible for the needs of 20,000 Flutter developers! That ratio is clearly unworkable for any semblance of customer support. If "only" 50 people working on a project used by one million people was unworkably low then every single successful project out there would be doomed.…

We got around 3m with seven guys, so yeah, and we don't even have on-call rotation / schedule, even though emergencies do happen from time to time. They think 1:1000 ratio is too big as well? That's crazy.

Are you comparing a developer platform to consumer software there? Dev platforms have radically different support costs to regular SaaS or mobile apps. Developers are really support intense.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#123

Weird, I'd never heard of Flutter (or at least it never registered), but then I'm an infra engineer, so why would I have? But particularly strange is that if you go to flutter.dev, you'll notice you can't find anything about who Flutter is. There's no about page with links to the people behind it, or any indication of what company sponsors it. Then this flutterfoundation.dev site... weirdly also doesn't say who's beh…

> But particularly strange is that if you go to flutter.dev, you'll notice you can't find anything about who Flutter is. It's on the front page: "A Global Open Source Community. Supported by Google, open to everyone."

I had to scroll for fourteen whole seconds on my phone to reach that part of the landing page. Completely invisible if you ask me.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#124
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp had less than 50 engineers (or was it employees total?) when Facebook bought them out, and they had millions of users.

What a bizarre comparison, WhatsApp engineers didn't have to review code for millions of users.

What a bizarre statement. cURL is basically maintained by a single person, and nearly the whole world uses it.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#125

Back when I worked on GWT, we had trouble accepting outside contributions because the team had a mandate to support Googlers. That is, much like other libraries and tools at Google, changes could not break google3. This means testing patches against google3 and either changing the patch, or fixing whatever code used it, and these are tasks that no outsider can do. Shepherding these patches is no fun when you have you…

What is google3?

Google's internal monorepo.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#126

Back when I worked on GWT, we had trouble accepting outside contributions because the team had a mandate to support Googlers. That is, much like other libraries and tools at Google, changes could not break google3. This means testing patches against google3 and either changing the patch, or fixing whatever code used it, and these are tasks that no outsider can do. Shepherding these patches is no fun when you have you…

What is google3?

[deleted]

Re: We're forking Flutter

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp has a very narrow use case and feature set to support. Flutter is a multi-platform framework for developing apps like WhatsApp. It seems like a apples and oranges here.

I'm comparing the impact. Small tens of developers, affecting millions of people.

Millions of people can be affected in different ways.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#128

>But, sadly, trying to work with the Flutter team delivers a different reality. While some developers have had success working with the Flutter team, many other developers have found it frustrating, if not unworkable. I'd love to see some examples. I've had my pull request merged in a fairly quick amount of time - less than one release cycle, which is what matters here. Also frankly, nobody forking Flutter will be ne…

> Also frankly, nobody forking Flutter will be nearly skilled enough to work on the Flutter engine (Impeller).

For me its so weird they ditched google/skia to develop Impeller in Dart from scratch in the first place. If skia was not ready they could move just 1-2 developers to Skia team to collaborate with them. Now they want to even write their own 3d rendering lib based on Impeller (flutter_gpu, flutter_scene) even thought google has already mature 3d engine in C++ (google/filament). For me from the outside looks like "not envented in our team" syndrome. We are now in funny situation that react native has react-native-skia and react-native-filament and Flutter teams reinvents the wheels.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#129

Back when I worked on GWT, we had trouble accepting outside contributions because the team had a mandate to support Googlers. That is, much like other libraries and tools at Google, changes could not break google3. This means testing patches against google3 and either changing the patch, or fixing whatever code used it, and these are tasks that no outsider can do. Shepherding these patches is no fun when you have you…

What is google3?

[deleted]

Re: We're forking Flutter

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm comparing the impact. Small tens of developers, affecting millions of people.

Sure and 1 guy built flappy birds played by tens of millions. The complexity is a completely different ball game IMO.

Flappy Bird was taken off the store by its author, if you take WhatsApp off the app store, that would be a completely different reaction to Flappy Bird.
Post reply on HN