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Flutter for Linux

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Re: Flutter for Linux

#51

Post by heavyset_go »

sudhirj wrote: post #17
colesantiago wrote: post #8

What is the off chance that Google will drop Flutter?

This matters only if Flutter is a closed source project – but it's not. You can fork it on Github right now and continue working on it even if Google pulls its engineers off. I'd assume that those of us (and there seem be a lot of people) invested in it will continue working on it.

> This matters only if Flutter is a closed source project – but it's not

It certainly matters. Without a team of dedicated developers maintaining the project, the APIs it depends on will become deprecated, and it'll slowly become unusable.

Flutter touches a lot of APIs across many platforms. It's a complicated project that needs to support virtually every popular operating system in a visually and behaviorally consistent way.

Flutter also depends on Dart's maintenance, which is another project without significant open-source contributor activity outside of Google employees.

> I'd assume that those of us (and there seem be a lot of people) invested in it will continue working on it.

Having contributed fixes to Flutter and Dart, Google does not go out of their way to build an open-source contributor community around the projects. I would be surprised to learn that any significant support is provided by open-source contributors to Flutter or Dart.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#53

Post by jamil7 »

vetinari wrote: post #50
blandflakes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dart actually has a lot of characteristics that make it appealing for a lot of the areas I'd have (begrudgingly) used Go - command-line tools or local utilities. It "can" be scripted, but also AOT compiles, has a saneish type system with generics, and doesn't have pointers to deal with. It's hard for me to want to use it on the web, but I keep watching it and wishing good things for it.

> command-line tools or local utilities. FFI is quite a PITA, though. Soomer or later you will have to interface some platform libraries, and Dart doesn't make that easy.

> FFI is quite a PITA

This is what made me nope out of it last time I experimented with a Flutter module in my app. I'm still watching it closely though as it could be a great fit for other projects.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#54

Post by blandflakes »

sly010 wrote: post #37
k__ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revery also looks nice. I wish they had more funding, tho. I find Reason/OCaml more compelling than Dart.

How is OCaml's multithreading story? Google says it's basically GIL-ed.

Simultaneously in a state of having-been vaporware and making real progress towards being merged to master:

https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/multicore-ocaml-june-2020/6047

Re: Flutter for Linux

#55

Post by Andrex »

fungos wrote: post #43

Flutter: yay! Snap: nope! Anyway, hopefully this will cause a push for flutter support on other distros that are snap free.

I'm still excited because when Canonical backtracks on Snap in a few years (like they seem to always do when trying to push some homegrown aspect of Linux), their Flutter work will still be there and will have seen years of improvements.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#56

Post by akerro »

RivieraKid wrote: post #31
axegon_ wrote: post #15

I'm actually a great fan of flutter and imo it is the best cross-platform solution out there. Probably except for web: though it produces very good result performance-wise, the end result is never really "web" and doesn't act like traditional web. As for desktop applications(whether it be windows, linux or mac), it seems like it's too mobile-oriented. I see great potential for simple solutions like self-service opera…

I've been using Flutter in the last few months and agree. It's the best multi-platform solution for mobile , although it still doesn't match native behavior and performance, it only gets close. On the web it's DOA for most use cases - it's just a canvas, so scrolling, text selection, shadow rendering, etc. is custom, doesn't feel native and must be downloaded and compiled. It can have a future on desktop. One "cultur…

>It's the best multi-platform solution for mobile

They announced beta version for Windows in the last few weeks, so what to expect? I've been using it on linux desktop for 4 months so far, there were many problems, but it's absolutely the best framework so far. It's miles ahead of Qt (which I've been programming in since 2010). Dart and flutter are just years ahead of Java, C#, Qt and React Native in terms of positive programmer experience, productivity, good looking UI. There are so many bad things to say too, but all I can think about are only due to immature ecosystem, but that's changing literally daily.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#57

Post by timsneath »

vetinari wrote: post #50
blandflakes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dart actually has a lot of characteristics that make it appealing for a lot of the areas I'd have (begrudgingly) used Go - command-line tools or local utilities. It "can" be scripted, but also AOT compiles, has a saneish type system with generics, and doesn't have pointers to deal with. It's hard for me to want to use it on the web, but I keep watching it and wishing good things for it.

> command-line tools or local utilities. FFI is quite a PITA, though. Soomer or later you will have to interface some platform libraries, and Dart doesn't make that easy.

Curious what platforms you're interested in integrating with. We're experimenting here and looking for feedback. As a fun demonstration of the effectiveness of FFI, you can now build Petzold-style native Windows code with Dart: https://github.com/timsneath/win32/blob/master/example/hello...

And here's a 500-line version of the Kilo console text editor built with Dart: https://github.com/timsneath/dart_console/blob/master/exampl...

Unlike the original, it runs on both Windows and UNIX-based operating systems.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#58

Post by thomasfortes »

k__ wrote: post #16
me551ah wrote: post #9

The future of cross platform desktop development looks bright. Microsoft is coming up with .NET 6 and Google has flutter. I just hope that these frameworks can replace bulky electron apps.

Revery also looks nice. I wish they had more funding, tho. I find Reason/OCaml more compelling than Dart.

There's a guy that managed to compile and run revery on android, I would love to have that as an option since I'm already familiar with ocaml/reason and only barely literate in Dart (and also prefer functional languages over object oriented ones)...

https://github.com/EduardoRFS/reason-mobile

Re: Flutter for Linux

#59

Post by timsneath »

fungos wrote: post #43

Flutter: yay! Snap: nope! Anyway, hopefully this will cause a push for flutter support on other distros that are snap free.

It's worth noting that Ubuntu support and Snap support are orthogonal. The Flutter work here generates standard ELF binaries that can be distributed outside of Snap, and Canonical's contributions to create a high-quality desktop embedder for Linux are applicable across all distros.

Re: Flutter for Linux

#60

Post by wstrange »

blandflakes wrote: post #42
axegon_ wrote: post #15

I'm actually a great fan of flutter and imo it is the best cross-platform solution out there. Probably except for web: though it produces very good result performance-wise, the end result is never really "web" and doesn't act like traditional web. As for desktop applications(whether it be windows, linux or mac), it seems like it's too mobile-oriented. I see great potential for simple solutions like self-service opera…

Dart actually has a lot of characteristics that make it appealing for a lot of the areas I'd have (begrudgingly) used Go - command-line tools or local utilities. It "can" be scripted, but also AOT compiles, has a saneish type system with generics, and doesn't have pointers to deal with. It's hard for me to want to use it on the web, but I keep watching it and wishing good things for it.

Dart produces surprisingly small docker images for server code. I recently created small Cloud Run web service with Dart - the docker image is 5.2MB compressed, 12.9 MB as reported by docker.

I'm not even sure Go would do better on image size. Tree shaking does wonders here.

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