Flutter looks good, but is painful • Hacker News Board

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#131

Post by piokoch » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 2:52 PM UTC

The question is: if Flutter will not get traction that Google expects, what will happen with the project?

The space of multi-platform mobile apps toolkit is already occupied by several well established players (React Native, Qt, Xamarin and a dozen of other more or less popular tools, sometimes well entrenched in their niches, like Unity for games).

Flutter comes with rather obscure language and is late in the game, so it will have to provide something truly game-changing to succeed and I am not sure if that what it offers now is sufficiently appealing.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#132

Post by verttii » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 2:56 PM UTC

piokoch wrote: post #131

The question is: if Flutter will not get traction that Google expects, what will happen with the project? The space of multi-platform mobile apps toolkit is already occupied by several well established players (React Native, Qt, Xamarin and a dozen of other more or less popular tools, sometimes well entrenched in their niches, like Unity for games). Flutter comes with rather obscure language and is late in the game,…

While it may not appeal to native devs I've found Flutter a lot more appealing compared to React Native.

React Native just keeps breaking things, like for example at something like 0.56 the textinput just broke on Android beyond usable and was stuck at that for like half a year.

I don't particularly like Dart as a language but as an SDK Flutter just feels a lot more solid than RN.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#133

Post by verttii » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:04 PM UTC

KhoomeiK wrote: post #19

desaiguddu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotcha! Edited. From my experience found Flutter more reliable & easy to operate compared to React Native.

I think this is mostly just a preference thing and may have to do whether you're coming from a React vs Native Mobile background. As a React developer, React Native was really amazing for me and made perfect sense. Flutter on the other hand, not so much.

Comparing languages is very different to compare these two SDKs. I've developed apps on both, and personally I've found Flutter significantly more solid and overall just better.

Everything is faster and just works (builds, hot reload etc.) on Flutter whereas on RN a lot of the things break constantly for no apparent reason. And all that weirdness like it might work if you rebuild a few more times in a row. Moreover, a lot of the debugging tools work exceedingly well on Flutter while trying to use even just the memory profiler crashes RN.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#134

Post by buckminster » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:13 PM UTC

stelonix wrote: post #119

pcr910303 wrote: post #17

While this has little relationship to the original article... We really should be trying to use the native GUI toolkit (or cross-platform native UI libraries like libui), not using Flutter-esque libraries that draws everything from scratch. Coherent UI is a very important point to users IMO. Users can assume that some special feature from App X will also work on App Y. For example, in macOS Cocoa, textboxes have univ…

I agree with this 90%, but I'm not sure about the state of GUI apps after Windows 7. Up to Win7 though, most applications simply used native controls, sometimes wrapped by WPF or WFC. I used to write for WINAPI/GDI and I used to loathe it; I mostly disliked the way messages were handled by default: huge switch statements. After switching to Linux and checking out the many "toolkits" I find myself craving for some GDI…

Minor nit: GDI was the graphics API. The user interface came from USER.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#135

Post by verttii » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:18 PM UTC

meerita wrote: post #56

My experience working with Flutter: - Overclomplicated syntax. - Material Design doesn't look as good as the native. Feels like imitation in many cases. - no vector drawable, PDF or Lottie support - I had to create special code for iOS to match certain patterns and components. - Typopraphy done wrong. Flutter maybe something good to start with, but once you want to reach good app design/code maintain that would be pa…

Are you a native iOS dev? I feel Flutter is a major upgrade over React Native, but perhaps native devs just feel it still falls short on a lot of accounts.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#136

Post by Bootwizard » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:18 PM UTC

piokoch wrote: post #131

The question is: if Flutter will not get traction that Google expects, what will happen with the project? The space of multi-platform mobile apps toolkit is already occupied by several well established players (React Native, Qt, Xamarin and a dozen of other more or less popular tools, sometimes well entrenched in their niches, like Unity for games). Flutter comes with rather obscure language and is late in the game,…

It will get cancelled just like every other Google project that's not the best in its field. Google can't seem to handle being second best in any project they start, so they use cancelling projects as a way to hide the evidence of their failures.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#137

Post by krzat » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:20 PM UTC

piokoch wrote: post #131

The question is: if Flutter will not get traction that Google expects, what will happen with the project? The space of multi-platform mobile apps toolkit is already occupied by several well established players (React Native, Qt, Xamarin and a dozen of other more or less popular tools, sometimes well entrenched in their niches, like Unity for games). Flutter comes with rather obscure language and is late in the game,…

The strength of Flutter is it's architecture. Nothing comes close. Web is too slow. Xamarin/React Native is too restricted by native layer. Qt is C++.

Popularity of Flutter increases steadily: https://trends.google.pl/trends/explore?cat=31&date=today%20...

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#138

Post by marktechson » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:20 PM UTC

piokoch wrote: post #131

The question is: if Flutter will not get traction that Google expects, what will happen with the project? The space of multi-platform mobile apps toolkit is already occupied by several well established players (React Native, Qt, Xamarin and a dozen of other more or less popular tools, sometimes well entrenched in their niches, like Unity for games). Flutter comes with rather obscure language and is late in the game,…

As a flutter user, I think the answer to what is "game-changing" is the flexibility it provides for making custom UI screens that would be really challenging in other frameworks. Also, there's the top notch animation support. When combined with tools like Flare, things are much more straight forward to create and they are cross-platform to boot.

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#139

Post by seeekr » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:24 PM UTC

sebe wrote: post #101

bernaferrari wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Never expected it to reach here. 24k views and it's been ~14 hours since I wrote it. I agree with you. There is currently a competition between kotlin multiplatform and flutter, a shared backend vs a shared UI. Guess what, exactly what you said, it's a lot easier to share the backend than recreate the full UI like a game does. I'm not against flutter, but it feels too immature for now and the pains reall…

BMW seems happy with flutter and are opensourcing some of their flutter libs. Quote from CTO Connected Company at BMW “By combining Dart and Flutter we have the first true cross-platform mobile toolkit; we feel it is a game changer to ensure feature parity for digital touchpoints and IoT. By moving forward with world class tooling, automation and modern functional programming patterns we can improve feature cycle tim…

It feels like he could have said that about any of the relevant frameworks. They're happy they've started down the cross-platform path using one of the solid available alternatives -- good on them!

Re: Flutter looks good, but is painful

#140

Post by obliviousonions » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 3:24 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #36

pcr910303 wrote: post #17

While this has little relationship to the original article... We really should be trying to use the native GUI toolkit (or cross-platform native UI libraries like libui), not using Flutter-esque libraries that draws everything from scratch. Coherent UI is a very important point to users IMO. Users can assume that some special feature from App X will also work on App Y. For example, in macOS Cocoa, textboxes have univ…

I think the popularity of Electron has shown that is actually isn't very important to users to use native controls. Also on Desktop, macOS is the only one that even has a single official "native" toolkit.

UWP is actually pretty easy to use and looks great & native on Windows.