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Flutter 2

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Re: Flutter 2

#311

Post by ehsankia »

dimator wrote: post #234
fastball wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me try: > Flutter 2 supports web now! > We've re-written GPay in Flutter 2! > We're dropping support for using GPay on the web...

That doesn't follow. There's any number of reasons the web app would be shut down, usage statistics being the most likely.

The web version isn't shut down, but losing crucial functionality. If Flutter let's you run the same code across multiple platforms, then what reasoning is there for one platform getting less functionality after switching to a framework that, if anything, should increase cross platform feature match.

Re: Flutter 2

#312

Post by vsmenon »

axaxs wrote: post #118
bilal4hmed wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not like electron at all. It compiles down to a native binary for the OS.

Eh, it's a little murky. I was playing with dart a little. It can in fact create a single binary, but it looks like it's just putting the interpreter with the code. I say that because if you strip or pack the binary, instead of working it shows the output of running dart with no arguments.

[ disclaimer: I work on the Dart team ]

It depends on how you run. Dart can either run in JIT mode or AOT mode. In general, when you ship a production app (e.g., for Flutter), you are using AOT - i.e., it's compiling to native machine code. In this case, there is no interpretation or compilation at runtime. We still bundle a runtime for garbage collection.

Re: Flutter 2

#313

Post by zmmmmm »

Reading all the comments it sounds like Flutter is exactly what I feared would come out of things like WebAssembly - a trojan horse to bypass web standards and turn the browser into a shell for shipping applications that put all the power back in the hands of application vendors and take away the power that open standards give to users (portability, accessibility, customisability, interoperability etc etc).

Of course, it will be achieved by delivering amazing developer experience and engineering in parity in all kinds of ways so this doesn't look obvious. But in the end, that is what it will be.

Re: Flutter 2

#314

Post by kroltan »

okamiueru wrote: post #222
kureikain wrote: post #50

I want to love Flutter. But once looking at it, it's a no go. It's the new flash. Really, you cannot copy the text anymore. React native is my goto solution now.

I would expect you to have come from a react background then? When evaluating technologies 1.5 years ago for the company I work at, I took a good look at comparing both react native, as well as flutter, and we decided on flutter. Now, out of the many considerations we had, in this process, "cannot copy the text" is... well, I have no idea what you are talking about. Are you referring to not being able to do this in a…

Looks like a very developer/product-owner-sided opinion, not being able to select text and other "trivial" things are what makes software tolerable and actually usable, as listed by sibling post by kevincox, I'll quote:

> Yup. I would also like to open links in new tabs, view images, copy links, search on page, use browser extensions...

Throwing away all platform conventions is a very heavy-handed and user-unfriendly way of bringing about portability.

Another triviality, for example is the behaviour of scroll chaining as compared to my browser: In Flutter, as soon as the inner scrollable hits its boundary, the outer scrollable takes over, while the expected behaviour for me would be for the outer scroll to not move until I reposition the mouse.

It's exactly the same as Microsoft's Windows 8 fiasco, by unifying the experience across platforms every one of them felt broken and contrived, and this effect is even more notable if your application deals with a more diverse user-platform ecosystem. Your app will be the odd one out that works strangely compared to everything else in every system.

Re: Flutter 2

#316

Post by reader_mode »

I'm currently 5 months into developing a mobile app for a startup with flutter and my experience so far is very underwhelming.

Flutter as a framework is not the worst but far from best, it's very OO while trying to use reacts vdom model which just wants to be functional.

The biggest limitation of the platform is Dart - it's a horrible language that should have died once TS and ES6 became mature enough. And I've used dart back when it was supposed to be a JS killer shipped with browsers, used dartium to build a MVP for an app using Angular Dart durgin the betas.

Back then Dart was miles ahead in terms of tooling and JS the language didn't even have async/await - so I was singing it's praises. But the language stagnated and it's fundamentals with a nominal type system and a closed object model make the language so inflexible and full of boilerplate it's incredible. It's very much like Java (the language, without the powerful ecosystem) and people prefer Kotlin for frontend for a reason. C# is similar but they figured out that they need to build a lot of things in to the language to reduce the boilerplate so they are adding stuff like Records and pattern matching.

If you look at state management patterns in flutter there's probably 5-10 competing approaches all lacking in their own way and all severely hampered by how unexpressive dart is. Or how you deal with serialisation/immutability/etc.

Re: Flutter 2

#317

Post by shawnz »

okamiueru wrote: post #222
kureikain wrote: post #50

I want to love Flutter. But once looking at it, it's a no go. It's the new flash. Really, you cannot copy the text anymore. React native is my goto solution now.

I would expect you to have come from a react background then? When evaluating technologies 1.5 years ago for the company I work at, I took a good look at comparing both react native, as well as flutter, and we decided on flutter. Now, out of the many considerations we had, in this process, "cannot copy the text" is... well, I have no idea what you are talking about. Are you referring to not being able to do this in a…

Breaking common user affordances (e.g. the back button, bookmarks, text selection, copy and paste) is indeed a big concern in the apps we make at my workplace and I would hope that's the case anywhere that values a positive user experience.

Re: Flutter 2

#318

Post by Dylan16807 »

okamiueru wrote: post #222
kureikain wrote: post #50

I want to love Flutter. But once looking at it, it's a no go. It's the new flash. Really, you cannot copy the text anymore. React native is my goto solution now.

I would expect you to have come from a react background then? When evaluating technologies 1.5 years ago for the company I work at, I took a good look at comparing both react native, as well as flutter, and we decided on flutter. Now, out of the many considerations we had, in this process, "cannot copy the text" is... well, I have no idea what you are talking about. Are you referring to not being able to do this in a…

Ability to copy text is less something I worry about as a dev and more something I worry about as a user, where I then hope nobody uses this thing.

It's not trivial.

Re: Flutter 2

#319

Post by damagednoob »

oblio wrote: post #262
superkuh wrote: post #181

>Moving forward, Flutter is the default choice for future desktop and mobile apps created by Canonical. This is terrible news. I thought Canonical learned from it's last decade of painful failures to converge desktop and mobile. They have different needs and it doesn't work. What this means is another dark age for the Ubuntu desktop environment.

Well, Canonical is a graveyard of techs. Launchpad, Juju, Unity, Mir, Bzr, upstart, heck, I can't even remember them all.

Still disappointed that Ubuntu Edge never happened: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge#/

Re: Flutter 2

#320

Post by the_duke »

stephenhuey wrote: post #169
the_duke wrote: post #3

Does this mean all desktop integrations have now migrated from alpha and are available on stable releases? The post isn't 100% clear on this. I tried out Flutter a while ago, and it's really promising as the only really viable alternative to the JS/browser stack for cross platform GUIs. Dart is not terribly inspiring and lacks the appeal of other new languages like Kotlin or Swift, but it's fine; as in: boring/easy t…

Seems like you've been around long enough to have read In Search of Stupidity. Lots of great stories in there, including one about a super famous tech person who once said the browser is too slow and will not ever be a viable place for apps. :)

Never heard of it, but it does sound like a good read!
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