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Flutter desktop shells

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Re: Flutter desktop shells

#201

Post by tapoxi »

weberc2 wrote: post #124
yc-kraln wrote: post #3

I really want to like Flutter, but I someone really don't want to spend the time to learn Dart. I can't really quantify it--some mix of yet-another Proprietary Google Technology, yet another ecosystem, yet another X. I'm tired I just want to build stuff that solves problems.

Context: I was a Qt developer in a past life. The alternatives for cross-platform GUI are 1. Electron 2. Frameworks like C++/Qt C/Gtk 3. Bindings to (2) Using frameworks like Qt in native C++ sucks because C and C++ are just terrible languages for GUI development, even with the bolted on object systems and language extensions (Qt extends the C++ language). Using bindings to those frameworks is nice in theory because…

Why is Electron so popular, but PWAs have seemingly failed to take off? Everyone was beating the PWA drum for a while, but I've almost never seen it implemented.

What's the reason, lack of discoverability? I'd rather run one Chrome instance than a dozen apps that use varying versions of Electron.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#202

Post by skybrian »

leppr wrote: post #175
rubber_duck wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried dart back in the Angular 2 beta days with Angular Dart and after using it I have the exact opposite feeling about it. It's a thing that solved a lot of very real problems that are still halfassed by NPM and Node ecosystem - package manager, build system, tooling around it - it was all a step above the quality of TypeScript/NPM/JS. Saner object semantics, good standard library, good tooling - it just got me…

> Dart feels like a better TypeScript That's only if you use Typescript as a class-based OOP language. If you're more used to functional programming and prototypal inheritance, then Dart will bear no familiarity. Due to its adherence to classical OOP, it feels way more like Java than Javascript. As someone who never did any serious programing in those classical OOP languages, I struggled a lot to find the right abstr…

Yes, Dart is a fairly standard object-oriented language, but this exaggerates a bit. Dart has first-class functions (unlike Java) so you shouldn't need a factory-factory in the simple case. That's just a function that returns a function.

You might need other design patterns, though.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#203

Post by sergiotapia »

joshstrange wrote: post #123
sergiotapia wrote: post #109

Hot take: Who's to say Google's plan isn't to make this become big, then purposely give iphone a shittier experience just a few ms of more jank to make android look better? Think long, long term. I wouldn't trust this.

I don't know if they'd do that but Google does treat iOS users pretty shitty. Their apps are always a decent bit behind the upgrade curve. Like they didn't support the new iPhone X display for a good few months after it was released.

Right? Hard pass from me.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#204

Post by mixedCase »

munificent wrote: post #195
mixedCase wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes some kinds of code nicer, but doesn't significantly affect the expressiveness or capability of the language. Sum types and exhaustive pattern matching aren't about expressiveness, they're tools for aiding code comprehension by increasing the locality of code that has no business being distributed into completely different classes, and decreasing the cost of making changes by heavily reducing the amount of…

> they're tools for aiding code comprehension by increasing the locality of code that has no business being distributed into completely different classes That's true for some kinds of code but not others. This is the classic Expression Problem [0]. For some things, it makes sense to keep all of the code for a single operation together. For others, it makes more sense to keep all of the code for a single datatype toge…

Not sure if I gave off the wrong impression, but I am not a proponent of having only sum types and discarding hierarchies; as you well mentioned each is well-suited to specific usecases.

I do however disagree on subclassing being the best fit for UI code. "The Elm architecture" as well as the model presented by React functional components with hooks offer sets of tradeoffs that I at least have found are better for most of the development I find myself doing when writing (and particularly when maintaining) regular business frontends.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#205

Post by fmxexpress »

weberc2 wrote: post #124
yc-kraln wrote: post #3

I really want to like Flutter, but I someone really don't want to spend the time to learn Dart. I can't really quantify it--some mix of yet-another Proprietary Google Technology, yet another ecosystem, yet another X. I'm tired I just want to build stuff that solves problems.

Context: I was a Qt developer in a past life. The alternatives for cross-platform GUI are 1. Electron 2. Frameworks like C++/Qt C/Gtk 3. Bindings to (2) Using frameworks like Qt in native C++ sucks because C and C++ are just terrible languages for GUI development, even with the bolted on object systems and language extensions (Qt extends the C++ language). Using bindings to those frameworks is nice in theory because…

Embarcadero Delphi Community Edition lets you compile to Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows with it's FireMonkey framework using a single UI and single codebase. It's free for hobbyists. The paid version plus a third party component adds Linux desktop support as well.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#206

Post by skybrian »

tapoxi wrote: post #201
weberc2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context: I was a Qt developer in a past life. The alternatives for cross-platform GUI are 1. Electron 2. Frameworks like C++/Qt C/Gtk 3. Bindings to (2) Using frameworks like Qt in native C++ sucks because C and C++ are just terrible languages for GUI development, even with the bolted on object systems and language extensions (Qt extends the C++ language). Using bindings to those frameworks is nice in theory because…

Why is Electron so popular, but PWAs have seemingly failed to take off? Everyone was beating the PWA drum for a while, but I've almost never seen it implemented. What's the reason, lack of discoverability? I'd rather run one Chrome instance than a dozen apps that use varying versions of Electron.

My guess is that teaching users a different way to install a desktop app limits adoption.

The dependency on Chrome is a turnoff for people who don't already use Chrome. An Electron app just depends on the operating system (apparently), so the install is much like other desktop apps.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#207

Post by mraleph »

edwnj99 wrote: post #42
yc-kraln wrote: post #3

I really want to like Flutter, but I someone really don't want to spend the time to learn Dart. I can't really quantify it--some mix of yet-another Proprietary Google Technology, yet another ecosystem, yet another X. I'm tired I just want to build stuff that solves problems.

I would've preferred dart to be more opinionated like golang but its not, you can literally write in almost any style and one advantage of that is if you have experience with any modern language, you should be able to write dart with ease.

Dart was actually really opinionated right from the start. Type annotations that has no bearing on execution; reified generics and dynamic typing at the same time; mirrors and noSuchMethod... even having semicolon - as opposed to not having it. These are all strong opinions about language design. They might not align with what is considered "modern" these days, but they are all opinions nevertheless.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#208

Post by Fnoord »

tapoxi wrote: post #201
weberc2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context: I was a Qt developer in a past life. The alternatives for cross-platform GUI are 1. Electron 2. Frameworks like C++/Qt C/Gtk 3. Bindings to (2) Using frameworks like Qt in native C++ sucks because C and C++ are just terrible languages for GUI development, even with the bolted on object systems and language extensions (Qt extends the C++ language). Using bindings to those frameworks is nice in theory because…

Why is Electron so popular, but PWAs have seemingly failed to take off? Everyone was beating the PWA drum for a while, but I've almost never seen it implemented. What's the reason, lack of discoverability? I'd rather run one Chrome instance than a dozen apps that use varying versions of Electron.

Because with Electron the "app builder" decides which extensions are ran. With a PWA, the user. Like 33% of all users use ad blockers, so its all about $$$. That (no incentive), and Electron was first...

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#209

Post by The_rationalist »

tapoxi wrote: post #201
weberc2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context: I was a Qt developer in a past life. The alternatives for cross-platform GUI are 1. Electron 2. Frameworks like C++/Qt C/Gtk 3. Bindings to (2) Using frameworks like Qt in native C++ sucks because C and C++ are just terrible languages for GUI development, even with the bolted on object systems and language extensions (Qt extends the C++ language). Using bindings to those frameworks is nice in theory because…

Why is Electron so popular, but PWAs have seemingly failed to take off? Everyone was beating the PWA drum for a while, but I've almost never seen it implemented. What's the reason, lack of discoverability? I'd rather run one Chrome instance than a dozen apps that use varying versions of Electron.

https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#210

Post by markdog12 »

munificent wrote: post #180
markdog12 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It already does, and they're working on making it easier. https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/34343 Not sure if this will use AOT or JIT though.

> Not sure if this will use AOT or JIT though. You can do either. You can compile a snapshot and run that on the JIT VM. This basically gives you faster startup because it doesn't have to do all the source parsing, resolution, type-checking, etc. but gives you the general runtime performance of a JIT VM (think V8 or the JVM). Or you can AoT compile your app all the way to native code. It's similar to how a shipped Go…

I was more referring what Flutter would do out of the box for desktop, but yeah, the question didn't mention Flutter.

By the way, is there a good performance breakdown between Dart's AOT vs JIT? I've read some tweets/comments that JIT is still generally faster. Not including warm-up of course.

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