161–170 of 748 posts
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wait for similar WordPress drama if google owns 'flutter' trademark.
They do.
I expect there will be some communication from Google at some point and the foundation will have to be renamed. It reminds me of OpenTF being renamed to OpenTofu.
> That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000. [...] 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. Ever heard of e.g. curl? Because a billion users use your software does not mean that you have to talk to a billion users.
Curl is easily 1000x simpler than Flutter and has existed for many times longer. Not really comparable.
> 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.…
There is no guarantee these 50 devs can actually focus on Flutter, instead they might get looped in in the internal race to AI products.
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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.
> Developers are really support intense. Shouldn't developers be the most self-reliant users possible, especially when working with open-source tools? That is, shouldn't we expect that when a developer has a problem, they dive into the code and figure it out on their own?
Developers are support intense because dev tools and platforms get used in a bazillion ways and combinations you can't predict. It's not like a nice consumer app where the user can only press a limited combination of buttons, and test coverage can be quite exhaustive. GUI toolkits are especially a bottomless pit of edge cases and bugs because they have tens of thousands of API methods, enormous numbers of features, they can all be used in combination, they have to run on multiple platforms usually and those platforms also have bugs etc. The support costs of a GUI toolkit are basically unbounded.
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WhatsApp once had just 50 engineers with 900M users: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
As far as I know Telegram has around the same number of engineers even today, handling around the same size userbase.
> How large is the Flutter team, today? Google doesn't publish this information, but my guess is that the team is about 50 people strong. I doubt google have even 50 flutter devs in their team. You can easily estimate by checking github pulse: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pulse/monthly https://github.com/flutter/engine/pulse/monthly Also take into account inflated commits by CI bots: engine-flutter-autoroll, sk…
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Back in the real world however you have canonical for years now who have made flutter the default for all native linux desktop development. I think your anecdotes are a bit out of date and irrelevant. People much better informed than you looked at this problem in a lot more detail in real life situations and came to very different conclusions.
> you have canonical for years now who have made flutter the default for all native linux desktop development And yet, I can't think of a single app I depend on for anything on Linux that relies on it. How'd Snap go for Canonical?
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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.
What about Python? They had 34 core developers in 2017 [0]. Python is used by millions of devs. They have to support a multitude of platforms as well. Same goes for a lot of programming languages like Go: a pretty small core, the rest is external contributions. And they have to support all sorts of platforms/configurations as well (probably more than Flutter does). [0] https://pythondev.readthedocs.io/core_devs.html
Key statement: "As Flock ships important bug fixes and features, the Flutter team can then choose to add those to Flutter, on their schedule. " I see a lot of negative comments but I think this will be a net positive over time to the Flutter community and to the technology itself. I think it will also give Google a reality check on the needs of the community.
Flutter Founder here. I'm very pro open-source, and pro taking-action, so hopefully good things will come out of it. I think this particular author is mostly stirring up a bunch of noise and does not represent a significant chunk of the community, but we'll see. :shrug:
Can you make any comment on this? Is it accurate?
>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…