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We're forking Flutter

flutterfoundation.dev

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Re: We're forking Flutter

#181

Post by chrisandchris »

ignoramous wrote: post #142
chrisandchris wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely, yes! Then make it two or three people, maybe 10 and there are still n-times too many people working on flutter compared to cURL.

Which boils down to: Number of devs vs. people using something is a very bad metric. Even number of supported devices won't work good in this case (I assume cURL runs basically everywhere).

I think it's very difficult to estimate complexity, and then make a statement about "how many people are enough" is even more difficult. Some environments are harder and more complex, some are just very heterogen and some are both. Sometimes it's the organizational overhead, maybe even something else.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#182

Post by tomduncalf »

JavierFlores09 wrote: post #104
ko27 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's better in most ways, for example, just recently LG decided to rewrite its TV apps from RN to Flutter https://webostv.developer.lge.com/news/2024-07-15-new-and-su... > Most of our apps use React. When we first adopted React, we were pleased with the development productivity it provided, but sadly its initial performance was subpar in terms of start-up time, memory consumption, and responsiveness. After significan…

I wonder how it compares now with the latest version of RN that brings out a lot of performance gains induced by the removal of their native bridge, and also faster startup by making lazy loading of modules the default option

Sounds like it might be talking about web React, not RN, also

Re: We're forking Flutter

#183

Post by devjab »

sterlind wrote: post #168
kgeist wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

to be fair, Python's performance has lagged far behind comparable languages (e.g. JS) for at least a decade. maybe more devs could give it the V8 treatment?

I’m not sure what you mean by this but Python can be very performant when you want it to be. That is to say, when you build computation heavy parts in C (or Zig), and remember to avoid the various performance pitfalls like not using generators when you didn’t want to load all those millions of elements into your memory.

What sets professional Python aside from most other programming languages is that everyone who uses it knows that it’s terrible and how to deal with that. Which will sometimes be replacing parts (or all) or it.

To say that it’s inherently less performant than JS is frankly silly though.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#184

Post by kernal »

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 the best thing that happened to UI development since Qt. Most people don't realize how many apps written in Flutter they use daily, simply because it's impossible to tell

I agree with you that Flutter has been a boon for cross platform development, but to say it's impossible to tell you're using a Flutter app is a bit of an exaggeration. I have no problem identifying Flutter apps. Not that I care as they often have a genuinely nice UI and are performant.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#185

Post by echoangle »

macspoofing wrote: post #108

I'm confused .. is this a Google-led fork? Is "Flutter Foundation" a google sponsored foundation? If not, why use "Flutter" trademark? Also, if the fork is called "Flock", why is this called a "Flutter Foundation"?

Google is the „owner“ of flutter, why would they fork their own thing? The post is describing the problem the author has with google.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#186

Post by sundarurfriend »

flawn wrote: post #59
punduk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any statistics on how much of it is used in production?

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.

It was 8 out of 86 apps for me (9% of my apps). Including Hacki, the HN client. It's a good variety of apps too, from big billion dollar companies to tiny games I downloaded from F-Droid.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#187

Post by fhdsgbbcaA »

plorkyeran wrote: post #21

> 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.…

50 people is a pretty huge team at Google to start with, there’s teams of <5 that support weird bits of core infrastructure that serve billions of users an hour.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#189

Post by com2kid »

maxrmk wrote: post #179
com2kid wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 we'd usually reply that day. It depends on an org's priorities and what gets put on someone's reviews. During one of the years when I worked on Windows Mobile (before Windows Phone!) we had an objective handed down from on high that we were to spend so many hours a w…

Totally– This was in the early days of open source .net, when it was still called .net core. We had just moved onto GitHub and I don’t think microsoft had quite figured out how to manage that organizationally. There is a point of time there where the fastest way to reach an engineer was not to go through a tier one contract that you pay microsoft millions of dollars for, but instead to just open an issue on the GitHu…

> There is a point of time there where the fastest way to reach an engineer was not to go through a tier one contract that you pay microsoft millions of dollars for, but instead to just open an issue on the GitHub. I doubt that’s the case anymore.

Historically when MS was filled with software nerds, the fastest way was to post on an online forum!

Sadly those days seem long gone. It doesn't feel like Microsoft empowers employees to really reach out and help customers anymore.

I do remember responding to those Tier One support contract requests. IMHO that was a better system than what the large tech companies do now, which is basically just ignore customers no matter what.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#190

Post by distances »

flawn wrote: post #59
punduk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any statistics on how much of it is used in production?

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.

Interesting to check, thanks for the tip. I have 6 Flutter apps, half of which I had assumed to be in React Native.
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