Flutter 2

But for me the main use for TS union types is to make discriminated unions, which is very useful wherever you have some form of a state-machine:

    type AppState =
      | { state: "loading", progress: number }
      | { state: "selecting_level", }
      | { state: "playing", level: Level }
      | { state: "success" }
      | { state: "failure", wantsRetry: boolean }
      | { state: "error", reason: string }

You can switch on that and the compiler will know what variant you're talking about, and it will apply exhaustiveness checks (ensures your code will handle all possible states)

I would not call the flutter SDK and component framework "beautiful" nor would I ever add the adjective "very". I have actually found it to be very verbose compared to alternatives I've used in the past. In some ways I suggest it is over engineered.

> offers a far better programming language than js could ever be

Dart is a bit of an odd duck language to me. I think of interesting ideas like the cascade notation (using .. to do sequences of operations on the same object).

Perhaps it is due to having worked a lot in Typescript and having my brain molded to code that fits that shape but Dart feels clunky in comparison. I can't put my finger on why, but defining and instantiating classes feels so heavy compared to the functional type code most Typescript seems to become. In Dart, I just feel like I'm creating massively indented component definitions with tons of properties and nested classes. Maybe I'm just finally accepting OOP and deep type hierarchies are things I want to leave to my past. I feel I can do 99% of what those things did with Algebraic types and functional composition. Nowadays I prefer that style and going back to heavy OOP feels bad.

With the dominance of classes, massive type hierarchies and quirky syntax - I'd just prefer to be working with a more react-ish framework in a language like Typescript. My feeling is Dart is a step in the wrong direction.

  $ cat a.dart
  void main() {
  print("hello world");
  }

  $ dart compile exe a.dart
  Info: Compiling with sound null safety
  Generated: /home/x/a.exe
  ~ $ strip a.exe
  ~ $ ./a.exe --version
  Dart SDK version: 2.12.0 (stable) (Thu Feb 25 19:50:53 
  2021 +0100) on "linux_x64"

At the time, they were making almost all of the same mistakes that Flutter is, and the devs I talked to seemed to be of the opinion that those problems wouldn't be fixed until browsers started adding brand new capabilities specifically for them.

Looking now at the demos at https://www.qt.io/qt-examples-for-webassembly, a lot of the same problems are jumping out at me. A complete lack of accessibility features, poor handling of scroll events, large load times, unfocusable fields, lack of keyboard controls, etc...

Halfway through playing with their pizza app, the page just froze and stopped responding to any clicks at all. Maybe those demos are outdated?

Blazor and Rust are showing a lot of promise here, but from what I know about Qt I'm much less optimistic, because Qt is used to handling everything about rendering itself -- and as Flutter is showing that's just not a good approach to building web GUI frameworks. But (again, purely from what I've seen) trying to layer on a system where Qt is actually interacting with the DOM seems like it would require a somewhat difficult shift in its architecture. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the problem though.