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Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

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Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> s/Fuschia/Fuchsia/ And also it hints that you don't know what are you writing about. Is this necessary? Also, you definitely shouldn't be throwing stones while living in a glass house. s/mobiles/mobile > You can but the portability would be an issue. Each major OS has their own set of API/ABI, vastly different from each other, and Fuchsia isn't an exemption. You can write with QT for desktops but it wouldn't work o…

Aside: Would love to see electron and Cordova bridge the gap together for mobile targets. If they can establish a few common interop libraries, you could come very close to the same code for both.

I'm really uncertain about a huge JavaScript runtime on mobile -- seems like an energy waste/slow code. Dart's AOT story the Cupertino wrappers for iOS in Flutter really excite me.

Disclaimer: I work for Google; all opinions are my own.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#302
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone is so fortunate to have 1GB/s internet. Waiting for a page to load is a terrible user experience.

Outside of a select few cities, getting anything more than 100 mbps down is literally impossible unless you have the budget to pay a company to run fiber to your home (at least tens or hundreds of thousands). And outside of major cities, 10 mbps might be the best you can get. Not to mention there are a thousand situations even inside of the major cities where a few mbps (if that) is all you can muster. I for one hate…

...in the US? Here in Europe I’m paying 30 euro/month for 200 megabit down (just 20 up, though), and I live in a 50k people town.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#303
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it also compiles to ARM binary via LLVM for iOS applications [disclaimer: I am TL for Dart Native Compilers] We currently don't use LLVM for compiling Dart to native and we actually never used it in production - though we previously built couple of prototypes to evaluate potential benefits of using LLVM. We use our own AOT compilation toolchain which has roots in our JIT compiler for Dart. > meaning that compil…

Out of curiosity, why'd you decide not to use LLVM?

In the two experiments that we did LLVM brought only marginal benefits so we could not warrant the huge dependency and associated maintenance costs. We already have a good compilation pipeline, which was developed for the JIT mode and we use that for AOT with good results. Adding LLVM on top increases complexity - suddenly to tweak things you need to be an expert both in our compilation pipeline and LLVM (which is probably 100x larger than the whole Dart VM source code).

A lot of optimizations which benefit Dart code size and performance require high level optimizations anyway, so having LLVM does not help you in any way.

That said there are obvious benefits for having LLVM as a backend - so we are planning to explore it yet again in the near future.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#304

This is the example flutter app for the web - https://www.nytimes.com/games/prototype/kenken#/ This is flash. You can't do anything in it that fills like the web - no copy paste, right clicking causes things to happen. I don't expect games like this to have links and proper bookmarkable urls, but I doubt it'll work as expected if it did. This is the epitome of the problem with flutter - it re-implements the UI, creat…

Also slow.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#305

This is the example flutter app for the web - https://www.nytimes.com/games/prototype/kenken#/ This is flash. You can't do anything in it that fills like the web - no copy paste, right clicking causes things to happen. I don't expect games like this to have links and proper bookmarkable urls, but I doubt it'll work as expected if it did. This is the epitome of the problem with flutter - it re-implements the UI, creat…

>This is flash. You can't do anything in it that fills like the web - no copy paste

Whereas you would have that in a Canvas or OpenGL equivalent web game?

>right clicking causes things to happen.

That's already the case for tons of websites, there's support for that in web standards.

>There's a reason why flash died out, and it's not only apple.

Yes. It was controlled by a single company, IDEs were paid for, it was more marketed to designer types, and it was frequently slow and used for apps and annoying stuff.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not React / React Native?

If i understood it correctly, React Native basically gives you a JS runtime environment that handles communication with native APIs of the system and is shipped with your app. Flutter (and Dart) will transpile into native code and compile natively for your platform. So on React Native you will have that abstraction layer add runtime latency and package size of your app, while Flutter (Dart) really outputs native code…

As I understand it, Flutter/Dart is compiled to native code but not using any of the native UI widgets.

To get native code plus native UI widgets plus some cross platform reuse you'd have to go with something like Xamarin.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all of them cause more problem than they solve I know what you mean. But have you tried flutter? Try it and you might change your opinion just like me.

I tried flutter. The available plugins cannot compete with the cordova or react native plugin system. For most apps a PWA or cordova-based web app is enough... Many apps are data-intensive and don't require fancy animations... My clients are more than happy with what the web has to offer.

>I tried flutter. The available plugins cannot compete with the cordova or react native plugin system.

The "available plugins" are not the right way to compare old frameworks and new ones. Of course a new framework like Flutter will have fewer.

But also not everybody needs to use "available plugins", you can do a hell of a lot with just the SDK.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#308
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internal politic wars at Google, with management having popcorns to see who wins at the end. If you are confortable with Qt, JavaFX, Xamarin, there is hardly anything to see with Flutter, plus they are based on programming languages that you actually want to have on your CV, instead of one that was dropped from Chrome and rescued at last minute by AdWords team. Plus, even Fuchsia is not so focused on Flutter anylonge…

I’m sure those are all great cross-platform solutions, and Qt in particular has been around forever and predates smartphones, but you never hear about high-profile app examples that use them. Unlike React Native, which has lost more high-profile companies that previously tried them than I’ve ever heard of any firm using Xamarin. I wonder why is that. Doubtlessly you can make great apps with say NativeScript, or in Pa…

Lack of ecosystem. You'll find yourself having to write ports/bindings/however these are called on your own.

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#309
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internal politic wars at Google, with management having popcorns to see who wins at the end. If you are confortable with Qt, JavaFX, Xamarin, there is hardly anything to see with Flutter, plus they are based on programming languages that you actually want to have on your CV, instead of one that was dropped from Chrome and rescued at last minute by AdWords team. Plus, even Fuchsia is not so focused on Flutter anylonge…

I’m sure those are all great cross-platform solutions, and Qt in particular has been around forever and predates smartphones, but you never hear about high-profile app examples that use them. Unlike React Native, which has lost more high-profile companies that previously tried them than I’ve ever heard of any firm using Xamarin. I wonder why is that. Doubtlessly you can make great apps with say NativeScript, or in Pa…

Can you explain what you mean about React Native? If I understand, you're saying more companies have tried and then abandoned React Native than Xamarin? Can you provide evidence of this please?

Re: Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop

#310
How does Dart compare to Kotlin? I was planning on learning Kotlin, hoping to use it for server side development as well. But somehow now I have a feeling that developing mobile flutter apps might be more pleasant (pure feelings not based on any real data).

Does Dart offer good performance, asynchronous IO and all those things?

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