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Flutter desktop shells

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Re: Flutter desktop shells

#211

Post by cwyers »

japanoise wrote: post #142
coldtea wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except if Google gets bored with Fuchsia, like it has with tons of projects. Heck, from what you say, it already got bored with Android -- if Fucshia is to replace it in say 2022, it means that Android just lasted around 15 years as a platform.

15 years - so only four years less than MS-DOS ('81 - 2000) by which point it was considered hairy and terrible? I'm no big fan of Google, but 15 years is plenty long enough. And really, Android is definitely struggling and showing its age by this point.

There is no sense in which MS-DOS died in 2000.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#212

Post by markdog12 »

mraleph wrote: post #182
shalabhc wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random Dart question - how is the standalone Dart VM implemented? What is it written in, is there a bytecode, etc? And is there a place where more details are available?

Dart VM is written primarily in C++. There is bytecode, but the story here is kinda complicated - there are actually 2 different versions: one is called DBC and is used during development of Flutter applications on iOS, there is another called KBC - that one is more like a classical bytecode, it is currently in development. > And is there a place where more details are available? You can get some high level informati…

> there is another called KBC - that one is more like a classical bytecode, it is currently in development

I haven't heard of this. Why another bytecode version? Increased performance?

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#213

Post by coldtea »

cwyers wrote: post #211
japanoise wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15 years - so only four years less than MS-DOS ('81 - 2000) by which point it was considered hairy and terrible? I'm no big fan of Google, but 15 years is plenty long enough. And really, Android is definitely struggling and showing its age by this point.

There is no sense in which MS-DOS died in 2000.

I guess the parent means when (NT-Kernel based) Windows XP replaced Windows ME, which was the last version to run on top of MS-DOS (iirc).

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#214

Post by jasonvorhe »

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.

It's weird how perception differs based on the platform you're on, because me as an Android user I'm often a bit annoyed that Google seems to treat iOS a bit better by either launching earlier on iOS or taking better care of the User Experience and stability.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#215

Post by skalkin »

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 was productive in Dart after few hours, it really fells a lot more solid and thought-out compared to JS or TS. Everything just works immediately and as expected, and the language is super simple yet expressive.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#216

Post by nova22033 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #148
nova22033 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yet-another Proprietary Google Technology Dart is open source: https://github.com/dart-lang It took me two minutes to find that using googles real proprietary technology..their search.

Sure, technically. The same way Chromium is technically open source. Funny how everything in the web browser world ends up how Google wants it regardless.

What's stopping you from forking and making changes you want?

Literally nothing

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#217

Post by devwastaken »

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.

What matters to developers is not the same as what matters to users. Users: Does it run and do the things I want and It's obvious how to access it?

PWA's are a sandboxed environment, where devs do not have control of browser version, cannot modify chromium, and cannot bundle necessary binary code. Even Spotify bundles in faster JSON parsers, and probably a number of other things.

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#218

Post by gaara87 »

abalone wrote: post #29

I just checked out a couple of Flutter’s showcase apps on iOS. The scrolling in the Hamilton app was atrociously stuttery, just really broken. This is on an iPhone X. Then I opened it again and it was fine. Seems like it was doing some initialization work that was blocking the main thread. Not sure if it’s Flutter’s fault but I never see broken scrolling like that on native apps. The other app I tried was some journa…

https://n8.to/ that's a brand new app still in development, but I think it's worth seeing what it's capable of

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#219

Post by csells »

alasano wrote: post #169
csells wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the PM for the Flutter developer experience. I'm currently digging into the next steps for our desktop experiment with Flutter and I'm very interested to hear how your xplat desktop app dev options fall short. What do you need from an xplay desktop app dev framework and toolchain? Chris Sells csells@google.com

Unrelated question, when did you decide not to pursue a career in sales?

I have heard variations of that most of my life. I always wanted to get into the Unix shell business on the coast so that the following would be true: "Chris Sells sells C-shells by the sea shore." Alas, another dream unrealized...

Re: Flutter desktop shells

#220

Post by gaara87 »

whytaka wrote: post #165

I'd be much more interested in Flutter if the styling could be made wholly separate like CSS. I thought we all agreed inline-CSS is bad.

Coming from a decade of app development experience. Both iOS and android have the capability of inlining styles as well as abstracting it into reusable bits. Flutter certainly supports it very well
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