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

Flutter 2

developers.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 780 posts

Re: Flutter 2

#481

Post by the_duke »

eseidelGoogle wrote: post #98
sydd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tested on my phone (1yr old pretty good Android one) and the whole thing is very laggy runs with like 10fps. What about a11y? The whole thing feels like Adobe Flex in 2010. It solves a great deal of problems that the web had but introduced a plethora of others.

[Flutter Eng. Dir. here] Still relatively early days for Flutter Web, so I would not be shocked if it's not buttery everywhere. However, we would certainly love to learn more. fluter.dev/support has links as to how to file an issue if you're interested. https://flutterplasma.dev/ is one demo to try. We expect to be updating flutter.dev/web and flutter.dev/showcase to update more over time.

As usual for Google products, this works fine in Chrome on a decently powerful desktop.

Not up to the speed of well-written Javascript, but definitely viable.

In contrast, this is completely unusable on other browsers or on lower powered devices.

On Firefox desktop, initial loading brings a "This page seems to be stuck" prompt. Once it finally loads, clicking the play button just does nothing.

Please note that for 80+% of websites/apps, Firefox is faster or on par with Chrome for me. Google products and some other exceptions are the only ones that are consistently slow on Firefox. Whether that's intentional or just a lack of testing, I can't say.

Similarly unusable on Safari.

On lower powered devices this just freezes Chrome for me.

As I mentioned in other comments, I like Flutter, but Flutter Web is not anywhere close to being viable for production use.

Re: Flutter 2

#482

Post by btzo »

damagednoob wrote: post #319
oblio wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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#/

The project didn't move forward because they didn't get enough funding ? I can't believe that there aren't enough people interested in funding this.

Re: Flutter 2

#483

Post by anoncake »

ttt0 wrote: post #170
yagodragon wrote: post #112

We're all complaining about how js is a bad language, tooling is a mess, and how the web is fundamentally built for documents and makes it hard to create app-like experiences. Now, Google comes and creates a whole new UI toolkit from scratch, couples it with a very beautiful SDK and component framework and offers a far better programming language than js could ever be but we're still nagging. I was also pretty disapp…

So now every website will require enabled WebAssembly to run god knows what code and I will have to install an anti-virus for my browser? No thanks. JS might be a bad language, but it's even worse in how it's abused with frameworks, tracking, etc for no good reason. edit: funny how I can discuss extremely controversial political topics here and never have any of my comments killed, but having a negative opinion about…

> edit: funny how I can discuss extremely controversial political topics here and never have any of my comments killed, but having a negative opinion about wasm and JS frameworks is just a step too far lol.

I'm not surprised. You probably happen to agree with the majority of HN on these topics so the upvotes outweigh the downvotes.

Re: Flutter 2

#484

Post by mathgladiator »

oblio wrote: post #233
pier25 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dart is extremely easy to pick up if you've written in any C style language. Someone in our team had a small Android TV app working in 2-3 days with WebSockets, web views, some animations, etc.

Syntax, semantics, code organization and best practices, libraries, frameworks, debugging and debuggers, IDE support (preferably multiple IDEs for multiple platforms), LSP support, linters, profilers, disassemblers, dependency license checkers, dependency vulnerability scanners, package managers, package repository with support for private repos and proxying/mirroring, should I go on and on and on? Your toy app takes…

I think in the framework of choosing boring things, you are spot on. However, all innovation tends to be ten steps forward and eight steps back, so the way that I look at it is simple. For a given effort, are those two steps forward worth the total long term cost? Maybe, maybe not. Usually not, but... people are going to do silly things.

I look at flutter as a quick way to bootstrap a simple CRUD app, but... for what? How does it improve on the web? Not 100% sure, but I do like the down chain investments that flutter supports like Skia.

I'm a huge fan of canvas, but I recognize its limits for building apps. It's great for many things like games, and it is a 2D escape hatch. I'll admit that I get suckered into the lure of building a 2D canvas empire that is cross platform because it would be nice.

Re: Flutter 2

#485

Post by tiborsaas »

ryandrake wrote: post #436
hanniabu wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why more resources aren't being put into Qt and making that easier to use or building a more "web-developer-friendly" abstraction layer on top.

I don't even fully understand why "cross-platform UI development" is such a holy grail. Is it that expensive to separate your business logic from UI and write the small UI layer in whatever the platform's "best practice" native language is? Is it that hard to find developers who know more than one programming language? With a lot of these frameworks and higher level abstractions, if you go off the toy-app happy path,…

> Is it that expensive to separate your business logic from UI and write the small UI layer

Not sure what apps you've built, but usually that business logic is the minority of the codebase. The rest of the stuff is boilerplate, like drawing boxes, describing layouts, handling events, managing state. All this has nothing to do with business logic.

Ideally, I want to write it once that I want a row of buttons what colors they have and what function should be called when the user clicks on it.

I did what you describe and extracted all the logic in a small component I manage and the result was very banal, extremely straight forward code with was essentially "business logic". The 90% rest was building the UI based on it.

Re: Flutter 2

#487

Post by gurkendoktor »

jaegerpicker wrote: post #220
yagodragon wrote: post #112

We're all complaining about how js is a bad language, tooling is a mess, and how the web is fundamentally built for documents and makes it hard to create app-like experiences. Now, Google comes and creates a whole new UI toolkit from scratch, couples it with a very beautiful SDK and component framework and offers a far better programming language than js could ever be but we're still nagging. I was also pretty disapp…

Are you a native mobile developer? I am (was I'm moving to ML/AI/Data engineering) and I don't think flutter is in any way easier or nicer than the native toolchains for mobile. Both Swift and Kotlin are better languages than Dart IMO, the IDE and tooling is far superior for both also. Flutter is faster but once to deploy a substandard quality of app for sure but matching the quality of a native app? That takes just…

I am a native app developer. I have only built one small app with Flutter. Here's where I disagree:

- I've used Xcode since version 2 and like it, but in my opinion it's a worse developer experience than Flutter. Refactoring and code navigation were much better in both Android Studio and VS Code.

- Flutter's hot reloading is fantastic. Meanwhile, SwiftUI previews seem to be built on the same technology as IBDesignable, that is, they're just barely stable enough for a short WWDC demo.

- I am very sensitive to non-native controls on macOS, but UIKit doesn't even have a standard button class, the first thing that everyone has to reinvent (Apple included). I wouldn't pick Flutter for business apps with loads of text editing, but it feels perfect for social game-ish apps, like QuizUp or Duolingo.

- In my experience (German freelancing market), the typical native app developer does not care about the user experience anymore. Ever since RxJava and Swift have hit the scene, the focus has moved from impressing the user, to one-upping your coworkers with exotic language features and avant-garde architecture patterns. Dart is a dumb language like Go, and I think that's exactly what's needed to bring UX back into the spotlight.

Re: Flutter 2

#488

Post by BystanderX »

Hixie wrote: post #126
tshaddox wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I haven’t been following Flutter, but I’m surprised their approach to the web is just shipping their entire custom layout/drawing code in WebAssembly and drawing everything with canvas. I would have expected them to actually port their native UI components (buttons, links, text, etc.) to their corresponding native components on the web, and maybe ship a custom layout engine if CSS layouts aren’t flexible enough…

We actually did try that as our first approach, but it really didn't give you the flexibility that Flutter developers expect. As the erstwhile editor of the HTML standard for ~10 years and the now TL of Flutter I must admit that it's weird to be creating a web framework that completely ignores all the HTML stuff I worked on before. :-) That said, Flutter is different from Flash in some important ways. Flash used the…

So this is already a pretty toasty section of comments so let me put this to you. If you've already answered this elsewhere, please let me know.

I would be surprised if someone heavily involved in the Web's development process for a long time didn't have some really sore spots about it.

That aside:

--

What do you think of the loss of opportunities for learning and customization that moving to an opaque system running "in" the web (flutter) implies?

How did you get into the Web? Was being able to easily inspect and change what was happening in apps you didn't have intentional source access for (web pages/apps) not key to that?

Have you gotten value from the ability to quickly use others' extensions of useragent behavior that seem highly unlikely to work with this approach? Or will they be able to?

Fairly loaded questions I guess, but realistic ones too, not just philosophical.

Re: Flutter 2

#489

Post by tiborsaas »

hamandcheese wrote: post #458
ryandrake wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even fully understand why "cross-platform UI development" is such a holy grail. Is it that expensive to separate your business logic from UI and write the small UI layer in whatever the platform's "best practice" native language is? Is it that hard to find developers who know more than one programming language? With a lot of these frameworks and higher level abstractions, if you go off the toy-app happy path,…

> Is it that expensive to separate your business logic from UI and write the small UI layer in whatever the platform's "best practice" native language is? I mean... yes? There is a ton of incidental complexity (i.e. unrelated to the business domain) involved in creating nice user experiences. If dev salaries weren’t so high then sure, more companies would probably spend the money to repeat the same work across severa…

+1

Furthermore users don't care about the technology used to build the application if it works, that's the unfortunate reality.

Re: Flutter 2

#490

Post by tobyhede »

nsainsbury wrote: post #465
tobyhede wrote: post #416

Flutter is not for everything, but it is really worth a look. We (AU MVNO/Telco) recently converted iOS and Android apps (200,000 MAUs) to Flutter and it has been game changing. We had experimented with react native and found it just didn't deliver. Flutter is different. On mobile platforms the experience is super responsive and smooth and for your typical consumer app indistinguishable from the native experience. Th…

From what I've seen and has been confirmed quite a few times now Flutter definitely does not deliver on producing mobile apps that are "super responsive and...indistinguishable from the native experience" You can even find the director of engineering for Flutter confirming that's not the case on a thread on Reddit along with numerous devs reporting being burned by Flutter and swearing off using it ever again: https:/…

What can I say? As with all things, YMMV. We're happy with it, we launched with zero customer impact, and have had no issues. Perceived performance has increased.
Post reply on HN