Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We're forking Flutter

flutterfoundation.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 748 posts

Re: We're forking Flutter

#31

Post by bsimpson »

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.…

It struck me that they estimate that the number of qualified contributors is 1000, but the number _so far_ is 1500.

They're slightly different things (as the post notes, the bigger number includes copy editors), but still…

Re: We're forking Flutter

#32

Post by justmarc »

normie3000 wrote: post #19
justmarc wrote: post #8

Flutter is truly a piece of great tech with remarkable quality and value. I hope the right path will be found. I think companies using it for commercial purposes (like what we're doing) should contribute something to the effort to help make sure Flutter not only survives, but flourishes. Bug bounties, supporting individual developers, supporting efforts and initiatives, professional services, or any other way that he…

> Flutter is truly a piece of great tech with remarkable quality and value. How does it compare to React Native from user and developer experience perspectives? Are there other competitors?

Faster and better in almost every respect we've looked at vs React Native or Electron. We're super happy with this choice we made quite some time ago.

I'm not qualified to give an in depth review/comparison, however.

Edit: we use flutter to build an app which runs on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux -- the same code base with pretty minor adaptations to desktop vs mobile and different screen sizes.

The experience has so far been fantastic. It's fast, it's relatively light weight, it's performant, it's a pleasure and we couldn't imagine doing it any other way.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#33

Post by mihular »

politelemon wrote: post #15

Who is 'we'? I'm not familiar enough with this ecosystem to understand. Is this one person or a set of existing contributors, or something else?

Exactly my thoughts. How anybody would take it seriously if the people behind are not known, is beyond me. Anyway I left flutter a long time ago exactly because the mentioned problems - ridiculously slow response time fixing bugs, like auto fill want working.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#35

Post by kgeist »

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.…

Our user base is of a similar order of magnitude, with around 70 developers. It doesn’t seem like a large number, indeed! A small minority frequently contacts support, suggests features, etc., while the majority simply uses the product.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#36

Post by concerndc1tizen »

throwaway19972 wrote: post #9
arccy wrote: post #2

To still use flutter in the name when your project is called flock seems beyond misleading.

Better than using a distinct name for a mostly-identical project or effort (looking at you, MariaDB).

"MariaDB is named after Widenius' younger daughter, Maria. (MySQL is named after his other daughter, My.)" (Wikipedia)

Re: We're forking Flutter

#37

Post by notpushkin »

e63f67dd-065b wrote: post #22
rubiquity wrote: post #7

They estimate there are one million Flutter developers/users. Have I been sleeping under a rock?

There's 200k weekly downloads of node on npm. A million flutter devs means that there's a comparable amount of node devs to flutter. I'm not sure how else to estimate it, but there's 170k github stars of flutter compared to 100k node, and a roughly equal amount of forks. The 2024 SO dev survey https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/ has flutter at 10% and nodejs at 40%. Github language stats has JS about 10-…

> There's 200k weekly downloads of node on npm.

I’m pretty sure Node developers usually don’t install Node from npm.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#38

Post by mckn1ght »

michaelmior wrote: post #12
normie3000 wrote: post #3

> What do you do if the team won't work on that bug for 2 years? Well, if it's a serious bug for your company, then you stop using Flutter. You don't have a choice. You need to keep moving forward. Your team doesn't know how to work on the Flutter framework, and the Flutter framework team is either unresponsive, or at least completely non-committal towards a fix. Are there no escape hatches?

> Your team doesn't know how to work on the Flutter framework The only escape hatch I can think of is to either have the team learn how to work on Flutter itself or hire someone who can.

Xplat FWs are just technical debt to prove a concept. Once you find critical mass the first order of business should be converting to native so you can remove that entire layer of additional complexity. Similar to paying down student debt to minimize how much interest you wind up paying on them after getting a good job.

IMO this should be the natural order if you size use it at all, not the emergency case.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#39

Post by textlapse »

If someone could do the same with Xamarin/Maui that would be awesome!

It’s going down the same path unfortunately as Flutter did.

Microsoft has de-staffed and deprioritized Xamarin/Maui to a point most of the folks are in Aspire-dotnet and related efforts?

Re: We're forking Flutter

#40

Post by throwaway032023 »

Words are cheap.

Seems like:

- guy wants to add PR more aggressively to a code base than Flutter currently is

- isn’t clear if they have a concept of handling compatibility between fork and original

- why not be a labor organizing entity and work with the flutter team?

Some of the PR that I am aware of that are stale and could be good candidates - are difficult design decisions and stakes need to be put in the group.

It seems ill advised. This is huge amount of work with limited upside and huge downside (adding uncertainty to outsiders looking in) and tons of effort (just in infrastructure maintenance).

Edit: if I were conspiracy oriented I would think it’s to harm community. I would pay this no mind.

Post reply on HN