Flutter 2 • Hacker News Board

Re: Flutter 2

#511

Post by ognarb » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 11:48 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #360

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 know if they've changed their approach over the past year, but the last time I looked at Qt demos for the web, I was solidly unimpressed. 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…

For the moment the only useful usecase of qt for webassembly I found is: https://qmlonline.kde.org/ It's really useful to share some bits of QML but otherwise I wouldn't recommend using Qt for the web as much as I wouldn't recommend to use Flutter for the web.

Re: Flutter 2

#512

Post by lhorie » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

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…

> It's not that good but it's gonna get there eventually, given the hype around wasm and technologies

Is it though? Canvas is basically invisible for anything that doesn't have functioning eyeballs (which include not only screen readers, but also mundane things like your browser's ctrl+f functionality, google's crawler and siri). You know how people complain about some SPAs' back buttons and scrolling being terrible? I feel like this "next gen" tech is just gonna be more of the same excellent-in-some-aspect-but-completely-subpar-in-others stuff.

Re: Flutter 2

#513

Post by anderspitman » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

andrewstuart wrote: post #252

OT but I recently did some research on cross platform desktop application development for MacOS and Windows. Here's the options I found. - (language: Pascal) Delphi applications can now run on both Windows and MacOS. - (language: Python or C++ and QML) Qt applications work on MacOS, Windows and Linux.. - (language: JavaScript) React native is being ported by Microsoft to both Windows and OSX. - (language: Kotlin) Kot…

Re: Flutter 2

#514

Post by anchorlink » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 11:52 PM UTC

merrvk wrote: post #113

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.

Yeah I feel the same, love the idea but I’m never going to be able to convince a team to drop TS for dart..

You (and your team) would be surprised at how performant and well designed dart is https://dart.dev/samples. Not to mention the ability to use flutter and target multiple platforms.

Re: Flutter 2

#515

Post by vially » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 11:57 PM UTC

The_rationalist wrote: post #457

vorpalhex wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with a team that went the React Native route. At first it was fine until we had to go slightly off the rails.. and I was rebuilding .so files based off random gists and updating linkage assemblies. React Native works until it doesn't and then you are getting into very detailed platform specific territory. A lot of the cross platform promises were untrue - we quickly learned the importance of QAing both builds a…

Or give Ionic react a try

I would not recommend Ionic. I've been using it in a medium sized app for about 3 years now and I get the feeling it's good for getting started, but once your app grows past a certain size it's starting to create more issues than it solves.

Some examples from the top of my head:

- various performance issues (e.g.: memory leaks which haven't been fixed for years [1])

- their push/pop router navigation seems like a really bad idea

- worse developer experience than using Angular directly (e.g.: last time I checked this, the save/compile/reload cycle of an Ionic project was an order of magnitude slower than the same project without Ionic)

[1] - https://github.com/ionic-team/ionic-framework/issues/19242

Re: Flutter 2

#516

Post by kbd » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 11:57 PM UTC

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…

Not to mention the LARGE realm of internal tools where you need something functional as conveniently as possible and aren't trying to drive a consumer-product-level market-differentiated experience.

Re: Flutter 2

#517

Post by oscargrouch » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 11:58 PM UTC

xvilka wrote: post #400

reader_mode wrote: post #316

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…

Would have been be nice if they provided a way to use Kotlin Native as a language for Flutter instead. Not a JVM Kotlin of course, because it's too slow for the native mobile apps. Or, even better, Rust. That would be very impressive.

I'm doing something that while not the same thing, it let you control the web infrastructure with native languages. The first SDK is in Swift.

But im sure that with enough work a Rust Sdk could be created as most of the core functionality is exposed as a C interface.

The product i'm finishing is more of a answer to the question of if there's something between the browsers and mobile application platforms that could also work in a more distributed fashion.

Re: Flutter 2

#518

Post by PhilippGille » Wed, Mar 03, 2021, 11:58 PM UTC

xvilka wrote: post #500

Hixie wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you prefer Kotlin you may find https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose more to your tastes.

It looks like Android-only, while Flutter is cross-platform.

I guess this is the relevant link: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose/

Re: Flutter 2

#519

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 12:00 AM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #301

blacktriangle wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're nagging because the apps suck and stick out like a sore thumb. Maybe Flutter will be the one to get there and be the holy grail of cross platform UI development, but the developer community has been burned by this promise so many times, we're going to have to see the final product before getting excited. Just because a project is ambitious doesn't mean we should all jump on board, particularly when similar proj…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Flutter 2

#520

Post by Hixie » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 12:10 AM UTC

BystanderX wrote: post #488

Hixie wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

Not sure what you really mean. If you mean the loss of "View Source" then I think we lost that a long time ago for anything but the most trivial of pages.

I used to say that view source was why the web was successful, and maybe it did help at the start, but I think we sailed past the point where view source stopped being useful years ago. Everything now is minified, and sites are too complicated for anyone to pick out what's going on from the original source let alone the actual served source...

> 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?

I'm a weird case, I got into the web by reading the standards. (Then I got annoyed the browsers didn't follow them, so I got into browser QA. Then I got annoyed that the standards weren't clear enough to allow test cases to be written, and I started editing the specs.)

> 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?

I have not. A lot of people do like extensions though.

Other platforms have managed to get concepts like extensions, e.g. on Linux (well, X really) I can replace my window manager, on Windows I can install DLLs that add features to Windows Explorer, on Android the "share" button can share to a list of applications, etc. There's lots of examples.