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We're forking Flutter

flutterfoundation.dev

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Re: We're forking Flutter

#141

Post by divan »

1propionyl wrote: post #134
divan wrote: post #120

> We describe Flock as "Flutter+". In other words, we do not want, or intend, to fork the Flutter community. Flock will remain constantly up to date with Flutter. That was the first fear when I saw the title - splitting community and having two incompatible versions. Good to see it addressed in the post. The second was just a fear of how it would complicate the development process, but it seems to be a drop-in replac…

Flutter is really not some big revelation and it's always shocking to me how it's evangelists act like it's the game changer no one else has noticed. It's just not that good? Just build native UIs. I don't know why cross platform UI has been such a hobbyhorse for so many for so long: it's a stupid idea.

> Just build native UIs

Do you see any reasons why many companies/teams/devs don't want to "just build native UIs" and instead are looking for cross-platform solutions designed from ground apps for modern UI development needs?

Re: We're forking Flutter

#142

Post by ignoramous »

chrisandchris wrote: post #124
izacus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> cURL is basically maintained by a single person

Suppose Flutter may be an order or two magnitude more complex than cURL.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#143

Post by refulgentis »

davedx wrote: post #138
refulgentis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on behalf of one of the Flutter founders, thank you for the thank yous. I bet they'd mean a bit more if it wasn't coupled to a lengthy thinking-out-loud post that casts doubt on it, based on how many job listings you see, for something you don't look for job listings for. Quick Google shows Dart 10th, right below SQL, right above Kotlin. https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-prog...

0.58% of jobs?

If you think its not popular until that increases past one of: JS, Python, Java, C#, PHP, C/C++, Ruby, Go, or SQL...I don't really know what to say. :)

Re: We're forking Flutter

#144

Post by 1propionyl »

divan wrote: post #141
1propionyl wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flutter is really not some big revelation and it's always shocking to me how it's evangelists act like it's the game changer no one else has noticed. It's just not that good? Just build native UIs. I don't know why cross platform UI has been such a hobbyhorse for so many for so long: it's a stupid idea.

> Just build native UIs Do you see any reasons why many companies/teams/devs don't want to "just build native UIs" and instead are looking for cross-platform solutions designed from ground apps for modern UI development needs?

Yeah I do see why they don't want to do it and I see it as a critical failure of risk management.

If you think pinning your entire product on a cross platform UI kit when every single one (except maybe QT) had proven a failure... then yeah I think maybe you should consider actually just eating the cost of building native UIs.

The risk analysis of building against supposed cross platform "solutions" just doesn't work out. Why do we keep trying to do it?

The idea of cross platform UI is frankly "f*cked from the jump" and should never have been a goal. I think it's only a goal because it's intellectually satisfying, not because it's really desirable.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#146

Post by ignoramous »

eseidel wrote: post #51
Topfi wrote: post #20

As someone reliant on Flutter, it is likely better to rip off the band-aid now than wait for a slow, prolonged decline. That being said, whilst I am at least somewhat comforted that the person taking charge is someone who was involved with the Flutter team at Google in the past, rather than a random, overenthusiastic person, I have a few crucial criticisms on this post that make me skeptical. For one, I'd recommend a…

Flutter Founder here. If you ever have any concerns re: Flutter, please don't ever hesitate to reach out. eric@shorebird.dev

> Flutter Founder here.

Flutter was a company acquired ala Firebase? Always thought it was a project (like Golang) incubated by/for/at Google.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#147

Post by conradfr »

normie3000 wrote: post #19
justmarc wrote: post #8

Flutter is truly a piece of great tech with remarkable quality and value. I hope the right path will be found. I think companies using it for commercial purposes (like what we're doing) should contribute something to the effort to help make sure Flutter not only survives, but flourishes. Bug bounties, supporting individual developers, supporting efforts and initiatives, professional services, or any other way that he…

> Flutter is truly a piece of great tech with remarkable quality and value. How does it compare to React Native from user and developer experience perspectives? Are there other competitors?

Ionic&Capacitor with Angular/React/Vue

NativeScript

Re: We're forking Flutter

#148

Post by IshKebab »

kgeist wrote: post #92
flawn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have an Android phone, get FlutterShark and check which of your installed apps use Flutter. It's a surprising amount actually. For example, I just recently discovered that Supercell uses Flutter for their Supercell-ID flow.

FlutterShurk says 3 apps on my phone use Flutter. Device Info (a different app) reports that's 0.2% of all my apps...

I only got one (ASDA), I'm pretty sure it's just a webview though so I'm not sure why they are using Flutter.

Hard to say it is "everywhere". It's probably more popular than any of the other cross platform alternatives though.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#149

Post by munificent »

nostrademons wrote: post #137
maxrmk wrote: post #30

> 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. Back when I worked on .net we had fewer than 50 people maintaining a product that shipped to over a billion machines. If you opened an issue on github…

Mythical Man Month applies to new product development, when you have a product you're trying to rush out the door that doesn't exist yet. Once the project already exists, is largely feature-complete, and is mostly in the "fixing bugs and small annoyances" phase, then Linus's Law [1] takes over. Debugging is very much parallelizable, because you can generally fix the bug without generating major impact elsewhere in th…

> Once the project already exists, is largely feature-complete

That may be a reachable state for a command-line oriented operating system itself a clone of an older operating system, but is likely unrealizable in any sort of system that is trying to be actively more innovative.

> mostly in the "fixing bugs and small annoyances" phase

I don't know of any UI framework that has had the luxury of ever reaching that phase.

> then Linus's Law [1] takes over.

If you maintain a widely used framework, I think the more meaningful eponymous law is Hyrum's: https://www.hyrumslaw.com/

This is probably the #1 source of friction for contributing to Flutter. It's not that the Flutter developers are overworked killjoys who don't value external contributors. It's that when, as the author of the blog post says, your codebase has a million users, it's really hard for a contribution to not end up breaking someone.

> if you have a good test suite you'll know if your fix has broken other invariants elsewhere.

Sure, but the fix itself will still need tests. So now you've got to walk the contributor through the process of writing tests which is definitely not a skill that most software engineers have and is not particularly rewarding for an external contributor who already has a working fix and just wants their patch to be "done".

Fundamentally, coordinating thousands of people to make a single codebase used by millions of people is hard. There is no silver bullet. It's a miracle it works at all.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#150

Post by ignoramous »

refulgentis wrote: post #143
davedx wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0.58% of jobs?

If you think its not popular until that increases past one of: JS, Python, Java, C#, PHP, C/C++, Ruby, Go, or SQL...I don't really know what to say. :)

Flutter in Kotlin instead of Dart would have killed! Alas. Hopefully, Kotlin Multi-Platform holds up as good as Flutter has (the rendering architecture based on Skia seems similar between the two frameworks).
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