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Flutter on desktop, a real competitor to Electron

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Re: Flutter on desktop, a real competitor to Electron

#41

Post by coldtea »

mixedCase wrote: post #18
johnisgood wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps people will pick it up. I would like to think that people will eventually stop religiously sticking to JavaScript. Right now, they are forced to use it because the alternatives are more or less worse. I would like to consider it a beginning of something better.

Then why not TypeScript, which is a more powerful language than Dart and has a much better ecosystem?

TypeScript is in absolutely no way a "more powerful language than Dart".

It's a clutch on top of JS.

Re: Flutter on desktop, a real competitor to Electron

#42

Post by Const-me »

detaro wrote: post #38
Const-me wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C++ is harder to use, so developers are more expensive to hire. QT is either GPL which is viral i.e. you have to open source your software under the same license, or quite expensive. Even if you’re working on open source GPL software, free QT edition has less features, esp. on embedded.

> QT is either GPL which is viral i.e. you have to open source your software under the same license, it is not.

Technically, LGPL option allows using in proprietary software. Practically, static linking is often better e.g. makes executable much smaller. And even with dynamic linking, see this note from https://blog.qt.io/blog/2009/11/30/qt-making-the-right-licen...

> If you are shipping an executable, you must include any data and utility programs needed for reproducing the executable (i.e. must provide components needed to recompile with a new version of the library) unless such data and utility programs are normally distributed with the major components of the operating system on which the executable runs

For developers of proprietary software, flutter’s BSD 3 clause license is way easier to comply.

Re: Flutter on desktop, a real competitor to Electron

#43

Post by coldtea »

matejmecka wrote: post #2

The biggest question is will companies start migrating to Flutter from Electron. Plus who will decide to use this in a market dominated by Electron?

Nobody cares about the "market" (in fact, there's no "market").

You ship apps, and they can be in whetever you like. No user cares if the app is in Electron or whatever (except only negatively, as Electron wastes resources).

If Flutter apps run faster and eat less resources, people will go to them, everything else being equal.

More dev currently using Electron will not matter.

Re: Flutter on desktop, a real competitor to Electron

#44

Post by coldtea »

shakna wrote: post #36
seandougall wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[raises hand] If it can avoid a >100 MB hello world, I’m on board. That makes it worth learning a language I would never have heard otherwise.

If that's a serious suggestion then... * Dart/Flutter {iOS, Android} [0] * (Scheme|Lua|C)/IUP {Linux, Windows, macOS} [1] * (QML with JS)/QtQuick {Windows, Linux, macOS, UWP, Android, iOS...} [2] * (C++|Rust|Go|Python...)/Qt {Windows, Linux, macOS, UWP, Android, iOS...} [3] * (TCL|Ada|Haskell|Python...)/Tk {Windows, Linux, macOS} [4] * (TCL)/Hecl {Windows, Linux, macOS, Android} [5] * (Scheme|C|JS|Haskell...)/GTK+ {W…

Most of them have been tried for ages and never got anywhere, and still look like crap (e.g. tcl).

Others have crappy support for different platforms (e.g. GTK and Windows/OSX) and that's for decades, not just because they are new.

None of them has the promise of Flutter: modern JS-like language, dead easy development, simple IDE support, cross platform, nice UI toolkit, hot reloading, and so on.

Re: Flutter on desktop, a real competitor to Electron

#45

Post by coldtea »

pjmlp wrote: post #27
wb14123 wrote: post #14

I'm wondering why people don't write cross platform applications with Qt.

Because most Electron apps are JS devs working around browser issues by packaging a single browser with the application. I look forward for the Electron wave to fade away just as MSHTML and XUL waves died before it.

Only there never where any big MSHTML and XUL waves.

Re: Flutter on desktop, a real competitor to Electron

#46

Post by coldtea »

Sylos wrote: post #24
anaisbetts wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Qt is bad. Do you think after nearly a quarter of a century that its problem is that it's just like, not well-known enough?

Correlation != causation. And even if that was the reason, your response didn't make anyone any smarter. How is it bad? Which you can't answer, because your only line of reasoning is that it has to be bad, because it's not as popular.

The UI is bad imitations of native widgets and has been forever. Always in the uncanny valley, except if you're running only KDE.

The setup of IDE/building/ etc is harder than it should be.

PyQT has mostly been the unloved stepchild, with third rate support.

Compile times with C++ are awful.

Major breaks between versions (QT4 vs 5 etc).

Re: Flutter on desktop, a real competitor to Electron

#47

Post by ksec »

coldtea wrote: post #43
matejmecka wrote: post #2

The biggest question is will companies start migrating to Flutter from Electron. Plus who will decide to use this in a market dominated by Electron?

Nobody cares about the "market" (in fact, there's no "market"). You ship apps, and they can be in whetever you like. No user cares if the app is in Electron or whatever (except only negatively, as Electron wastes resources). If Flutter apps run faster and eat less resources, people will go to them, everything else being equal. More dev currently using Electron will not matter.

Or may be Electron will improve to the point where Switching to Flutter didn't matter?

It doesn't matter which framework really, any improvement is much better then what we currently have. WhatsApp on Mac currently uses 1GB Memory sitting there doing nothing. Not too bad for an Electron App I guess since Telegram uses 650MB after being opened for 48 hours, but it does sit at 150MB once it is closed and reopened.

And before anyone else say Memory were suppose to be filled, consider that paging actually lower the lifespan of a SSD, I have currently done 2TB of writing over the past few days.

Re: Flutter on desktop, a real competitor to Electron

#49

Post by pjmlp »

coldtea wrote: post #45
pjmlp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most Electron apps are JS devs working around browser issues by packaging a single browser with the application. I look forward for the Electron wave to fade away just as MSHTML and XUL waves died before it.

Only there never where any big MSHTML and XUL waves.

I surely remeber quite a few on the enterprise space and plenty of XUL based installers.

Re: Flutter on desktop, a real competitor to Electron

#50

Post by mixedCase »

bsingh4 wrote: post #28
mixedCase wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not TypeScript, which is a more powerful language than Dart and has a much better ecosystem?

Dart has a sound type system. Why would someone voluntarily deal with TypeScript unless forced to by the browser environment?

Row polymorphism and algebraic data types if we want to talk about things Dart does not have, with an enormous ecosystem at your disposition.

If we want to prioritize a sound type system, why then go for a language that is for the most part Java but with no ecosystem, instead of something like Reason/OCaml, Haskell, PureScript which absolutely blow Dart out of the water as languages; or even if your number one priority is targeting Java devs with something more palatable, why not Kotlin even?

Why give artificial life to a language that was on its deathbed and brings absolutely nothing useful to the ecosystem yet will contribute to the amount of churn suffered in the industry?

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