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Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]

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Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]

#181

Post by pjmlp »

yagodragon wrote: post #51
preommr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't figure out flutter. I see so many rave reviews. But I personally tried it and strongly disliked it. The toolkit and Android Studio run horribly slow - like really slow. And the output is basically this generation's flash. Some of the samples I tried on their gallery are mediocre. Very slight, but noticeable sluggishness. Some are just terrible; the 2d transformations moves at like 7fps. Plus there are so many…

- Flutter has built-in hot reload that enables fast iterations when designing an app. When you need to reset state though you have to reload the app which takes some time but it's not horribly slow. - The performance of production builds is really good, better than any other cross-platform solution including web apps, PWAs, react native. I've got flutter apps running great on my cheap, old (circa 2015) phone with and…

> - Flutter has built-in hot reload that enables fast iterations when designing an app. When you need to reset state though you have to reload the app which takes some time but it's not horribly slow.

Just like Common Lisp and Smalltalk, and now being added to WPF/WinUI, SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose,....

Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]

#182

Post by pjmlp »

okareaman wrote: post #125
apta wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I think by that comparison, Flutter wins hands down. I'd be interested to hear your experience about why that is.

I really like C# and .Net for getting the job done but Balzor runs Mono .Net in Wasm and the startup time is brutal for the public internet. 2 to 3 seconds. This leads me to believe Blazor is targeted at corporate intranets on high speed networks where you have a ready supply of C# programmers

That is a temporary solution, AOT with CoreRT will be done by .NET 6 (postponed from 5 due to Corona impact on development).

Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]

#183

Post by jurip »

The_rationalist wrote: post #56
jamil7 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Took me a while to get on board with Flutter, only really started enjoying it after I gave it a few goes. Coming to Dart after Swift and Kotlin feels like a big downgrade but languages aren't that important, as you said the whole environment is so much more streamlined than Android dev. I'm using it for Android only however and keeping my existing iOS app in Swift.

Off topic but regarding language design, what are some pros about swift that Kotlin hasn't?

Not the OP, but:

1. Value types

2. Tuples

3. Key paths

4. Checked exceptions (could be more powerful in Swift, but they are there, and when not used in excess they are actually pretty nice, and Swift's `try` syntax is excellent)

5. Swift's enums and `switch` feel both more straightforward and more powerful than Kotlin's sealed classes and `when` (I'm not sure about this, but I think there are situations where you get better coverage checking with Swift's pattern matching.)

6. Reified generics (I know that opinions on this vary, and it doesn't often matter, but I've been just writing some code where it's been nice to be slightly more type safe with Any values)

7. More principled null handling (Optional is just an enum, although with some extra syntactic support)

8. `if let`, `if case`, `guard let` and `guard case` allow for simpler handling of multiple values than Kotlin's `?.let` and null checks

I like Kotlin being more expression oriented, but in the end I often find my Swift code to be less contorted due to the more powerful conditional constructs. GC vs ARC isn't much of an issue, both work for me.

Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]

#184

Post by pjmlp »

filoleg wrote: post #85
byeager wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean Google's support will likely not continue or that the project will not continue if Google pulls its support.

The way I read it, it looks like OP is saying that in case Google pulls out, then it will likely not continue. And I tend to agree with this. I can foresee an initial counter-push for the first year or so after google pulls out, but then the project will die its own death. However, with Flutter specifically, I have a strong feeling that Google won't pull out. Esp given how Dart was kind of a big flop for years after…

Not Google per se, Ad Words team rescued the project from closing down as they had a major effort to port from GWT to Dart 1.0.

Ad Words is what keeps Flutter alive.

Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]

#185

Post by mhoad »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #165
caditinpiscinam wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine too. It does gradual typing better than any other language I've tried.

I think this means sometimes static sometimes dynamic. but can you explain some use cases for this? I am strongly in favor of static, coming from C.

Everything is static by default unless you explicitly opt to declare a variable as dynamic for specific use cases.

Also worth noting that Dart now also includes fully sound null safety https://dart.dev/null-safety

Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]

#186

Post by mhoad »

hapless wrote: post #74

Living proof there's at least one (1) flutter user outside Google

It was literally the fourth most desired framework in the 2020 StackOverflow developer survey and was third the year before. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020

Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]

#188

Post by mekkkkkk »

haarts wrote: post #53
newbie578 wrote: post #13

Flutter is awesome! I truly believe it is a game changer for startups pushing an MVP as fast as possible. One codebase to build apps on iOS, Android and for the web (as soon as they improve the web one to the release version) is great, and Flutter is fun to use. The drawback could be the many states of management... But that is not a deal breaker

The state management is THE headache of Flutter IMO. There are many options now and I expect Google is following this development closely. Sooner or later they'll either endorse a solution or come up with something better.

They have endorsed solutions, but as it's still quite new it's a moving target. Originally they pushed for BLoCs, and now I think Provider is the preferred state management solution. There will probably be another one soon. At the end of the day they all work, but with different pros and cons.

Even if it's not the fotm, I'm very happy with BLoCs for global state and not shying away from using classic stateful widgets and forwarding data between screens where intermediate states are needed.

If there is something I learned from being a web dev for my entire life it's to not always jump on the latest bandwagon. It's cool when things move quickly, but you must be careful to not get motion sickness.

Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]

#189

Post by jmnicolas »

nsajko wrote: post #118
nsm wrote: post #62

What is the advantage of this over the more popular embedded solution which is AFAICT Qt? It was quickly glossed over in the slides without any explanation. I guess one is Dart is a safer language than C++.

As-in-beer freedom.

Google beer though...

Re: Graphical User Interface Using Flutter in Embedded Systems [pdf]

#190

Post by madmulita »

singhrac wrote: post #27

I also, independently, started writing an app in Flutter for fun (no experience in mobile/desktop GUI work, several years since I've worked in front-end web). I can give a list of pros/cons that probably overlaps what you've heard: Pros: - The toolkit feels fairly mature and not too hard to parse. I think there's a lot of "this class works with defaults and breaks otherwise" feeling, though the core components are ro…

I thought we'd agreed on hating parenthesis. The example on Flutter's landing page shows 9 lines of square, rounded and curly braces with some sprinkled commas and semicolons.
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