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Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

developers.googleblog.com

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Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#21

Post by thosakwe »

losvedir wrote: post #15

Wow, talk about burying the lede. I'm not sure how I feel about Google's so-called "ambient computing" idea that they were all about at this year's Google I/O, but Flutter being championed for desktop and web are huge! Does this mean the end of Electron, finally? They say it runs on macOS, I hope they get to Windows and Linux soon. I built a little Android/iOS app in Flutter and it was a real delight. I didn't especi…

> I know Dart's original vision was to replace JS but it seems they backed off that a bit.

More than "a bit" - replacing JS hasn't been the goal for several years now.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#24

Post by pjmlp »

erokar wrote: post #20

What are people's impression of Dart as a language, compared to e.g. Typescript? Reviews so far seems lackluster. Does Dart have anything that sets it apart from JS, like immutable data structures out of the box? How's the support for functional programming, e.g. first order functions, closures, higher order functions like map, filter, reduce, etc? How advanced is the typing system, are we talking Java level or signi…

Less than Java, while doing the @Override mistake instead of doing a proper keyword.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#25

Post by pjmlp »

yesimahuman wrote: post #2

Bizarre reading the vision for this "ambient computing" platform given that the web platform has already been doing that for years and you could imagine the Chrome team using nearly identical terms to describe what their mission is.

If you haven't done so, you should spend some time watching the tracks from Google IO.

The way some presenters speak, it seems that other OS or framework groups are competition that belongs to another company, instead of teams that work for the same employer.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#26

Post by pjmlp »

losvedir wrote: post #15

Wow, talk about burying the lede. I'm not sure how I feel about Google's so-called "ambient computing" idea that they were all about at this year's Google I/O, but Flutter being championed for desktop and web are huge! Does this mean the end of Electron, finally? They say it runs on macOS, I hope they get to Windows and Linux soon. I built a little Android/iOS app in Flutter and it was a real delight. I didn't especi…

Microsoft's team for "React Native for Windows" and now "React Native for macOS", keep showing benchmarks how resource hungry Electron is versus C++, C# and React Native.

So I keep hoping that they could eventually trigger a move from Electron to React Native for VS Code, the only Electron app I care to waste my time on.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#27

Post by pjmlp »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #22

Ugh, another Flutter media campaign. Why would you ever learn a Google language and use a Google framework, especially a framework that has to emulate all other platform UIs. How long until it's shut down?

For the same reason people learn Android Java, and use Android to publish Android apps.

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#28

Post by gresrun »

erokar wrote: post #20

What are people's impression of Dart as a language, compared to e.g. Typescript? Reviews so far seems lackluster. Does Dart have anything that sets it apart from JS, like immutable data structures out of the box? How's the support for functional programming, e.g. first order functions, closures, higher order functions like map, filter, reduce, etc? How advanced is the typing system, are we talking Java level or signi…

Full disclosure: Google employee

As an engineer that's written a lot of (old-skool) JS, Java, Obj-C, C++, and PHP, it is a real pleasure to develop web frontends with Dart.

Immutable Data Structures: Not out-of-the-box but we use the BuiltValue[0]/BuiltCollection[1] libraries extensively internally Functional Programming: Dart's Iterable[2] and Stream[3] classes have all the standard higher-order functions, like map, filter/where, reduce, fold, etc. Type System: With Dart 2.0[4], the type system is really great. Expressive with good type-inference, support for generic types, mixins, & typedefs. It's actually better than Java, IMO.

Also, the async story is fantastic! JS has caught up with Dart in some areas recently but Futures, Streams, async/await, & async*/yield, have long been first-class members of the Dart language.[5]

[0]: https://github.com/google/built_value.dart [1]: https://github.com/google/built_collection.dart [2]: https://api.dartlang.org/stable/2.7.0/dart-core/Iterable-cla... [3]: https://api.dartlang.org/stable/2.7.0/dart-async/Stream-clas... [4]: https://dart.dev/dart-2 [5]: https://dart.dev/codelabs/async-await

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#29

Post by somesortofsystm »

erokar wrote: post #20

What are people's impression of Dart as a language, compared to e.g. Typescript? Reviews so far seems lackluster. Does Dart have anything that sets it apart from JS, like immutable data structures out of the box? How's the support for functional programming, e.g. first order functions, closures, higher order functions like map, filter, reduce, etc? How advanced is the typing system, are we talking Java level or signi…

Still a very IDE-dependent and tooling-heavy language.

Frankly, after the JS fiasco, Dart seems too little, too late. Back to Lua-on-all-the-things for me!

Re: Flutter: UI platform designed for ambient computing

#30

Post by amelius »

erokar wrote: post #20

What are people's impression of Dart as a language, compared to e.g. Typescript? Reviews so far seems lackluster. Does Dart have anything that sets it apart from JS, like immutable data structures out of the box? How's the support for functional programming, e.g. first order functions, closures, higher order functions like map, filter, reduce, etc? How advanced is the typing system, are we talking Java level or signi…

Any language/toolchain that compiles to both native Android and native iOS is going to be a blessing, regardless of the features at the language-level.
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