Live data from Hacker News

Flutter 2

developers.googleblog.com

611–620 of 780 posts

Re: Flutter 2

#611
post #400

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.

You really don't know what you're talking about, do you? Kotlin jvm is significantly faster than kotlin native. Also both kotlin native and Kotlin jvm are multiple time faster than dart. Indeed Kotlin is a better language than dart. Rust is obviously a missfit for frontend programming, nobody wants to loose productivity on low level issues such as memory management.

Re: Flutter 2

#612

I long for the day when software development steps out of its infancy and we have one programming language that targets all platforms and frameworks. Kotlin is pretty great - so you're in this situation where you can either learn Flutter or JavaScript - at least with JavaScript you can also target the web (I'm aware that Flutter 2 also can target the web, but it's not the same thing). edit: I must clarify - I'm not s…

There are a lot of cross-platform development frameworks.

I know 3-4 options just for C#.

Re: Flutter 2

#613
post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Could any Android dev veterans chime in and comment on JetPack? This is the first time I'm hearing about it and I'm not sure I like it. It looks like a weird blend of HTML, CSS and JavaScript event handlers and I'm starting to wonder: Why not use web technologies from the get-go then and make use of the lessons learnt there? This reminds me, I'm getting the impression that with every new UI framework that gets releas…

The step 6 is to integrate graalVM into web browsers in order to allow seamless interoperability between any language (e.g Kotlin) and any other language, especially javascript and the web apis.

Unfortunately because of harmful politics from mozilla pushing the NIH webassembly, it's not going to happen before a proponent come (maybe Microsoft someday)

Re: Flutter 2

#614
post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

So what about working on integrating graalVM into chromium so that e.g Kotlin can interoperrate with javascript and the web apis? That would be the best solution and support for swift could be added as graalvm supports llvm.

Re: Flutter 2

#615

As a hobbyist Flutter user, I would like to be excited for this release. However, this announcement page does not do a very good job at highlighting changes and new features from Flutter 1. The only concrete feature mentioned is the web platform being stable. Everything else is old news or plugging random companies. The changelog ( https://flutter.dev/docs/development/tools/sdk/release-notes... ) looks like a dump of…

You're right! This isn't an exhaustive listing of the features in Flutter 2 or changes since Flutter 1.12 (which was our last stable release). For that, there's a separate article: https://medium.com/flutter/whats-new-in-flutter-2-0-fe8e95ec...

One suggestion: It would help if there was an easy to access demo app that I could point people to to showcase Flutter.

The flutter gallery is useful for developers, but it's not a good showcase for what a real world Flutter app would look like.

The new Flutter Folio app ( https://flutter.gskinner.com/ )looked promising, but then I had to scroll way down to see the actual app links. The Web link looked promising, but I hit a brick wall when it wanted me to register a new account before I could do anything ( https://www.flutterfolio.com/builds/latest/web-build-auto/#/ )

Can we get an accessible, up-to-date, canonical Flutter demo app that doesn't require account creation, logins, or any other friction?

Re: Flutter 2

#616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> forgot to create a killer app example with publicly available source code. Show us a minor Google property re-done in Flutter with code examples and people would flock to it. Can you think of a "minor Google property" that is open source?

Maybe some android utility that doesn't need Google integration.. Let's say calculator app from next android version?

I mean... if we ported Android Calculator to Flutter, would that really impress or convert anyone?

Re: Flutter 2

#618
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just visited flutterfolio.com. The very first thing I tried to do is enter a username and Tab to the password field. But Tab just catapulted my input focus to the browser address bar. I mean, come on.

The accessibility is a bigger concern, but flutterfolio.com also A) lags on my work machine when tabbing through fields B) doesn't handle HDPI screens well (the entire interface looks blurry) C) keeps fields visually indicated as selected even when I click outside of the browser (if I start typing, is it going to go into the field or not?) D) has a separate touch mode? Touch doesn't just work? Looked up another of th…

B.2) I bet that it doesn’t respect a wheel multiplier either. It is 3 down keys by default, but I set it to 6 (7 at summer). Even VSCode annoyingly does not, but at least it has its own setting for that, which still only affects text buffers and not everything else.

Re: Flutter 2

#619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

So what about working on integrating graalVM into chromium so that e.g Kotlin can interoperrate with javascript and the web apis? That would be the best solution and support for swift could be added as graalvm supports llvm.

If you can create a binary that links with a C api, its possible.

The access to DOM apis are going over the C, so its just a matter of wrapping all up in the target language.

Im using the Chrome multi-process architecture, but instead of a renderer process what gets called is a application executable that binds to Webkit and acts as the renderer process do to Chrome now.

So this gives the application much more control over the client rendering, hooking over every event WebKit triggers, something that is not even possible with Javascript now. So its much more powerful.

You also have a "service" process which runs as a service, that is actually the one that receive every request and can launch the application process or do something else.

The requests are over GRPC, so the service process serve not only the UI requests for routes but also the RPC method calls to the API it defined according to what the app does. The API for both are in Swift, but the core runtime and system is on C++ and in a multi-process architecture, so any native app that can compile into a standalone binary and interface with a C api can also use the facilities.

The applications and resource distributions are over torrent so anyone can serve the application without any intermediaries or shipping on servers.

If a app want to talk to the cloud, its just a matter of doing so when processing the routes or the RPC method calls, but it can work offline or eventually online/offline given its design.

I've heard Kotlin can produce standalone binaries, so that means its possible (and no WebASM shenanigans with direct access to Webkit and with the real native boost)

Unfortunately i cannot ship with another SDK right now because i'm doing too much already, but i intend to create interfaces for other languages once things are more stable, and people understand better what is it's place in the game.

But is more a application and window manager as Chrome is more-less and less as Electron or Flutter, where it wraps a standalone app.

With this design together with the RPC api's exposed by each application, you end forming a local network of apps, where they can work with each-other. And with the Api's working as a social contract, you can replace the application to serve the same things without losing everything (effectively real data ownership)

But my goal is that you can just call "./pacman" and the thing pops, even being managed by a core process as in chrome. The user dont need to deal or know anything about it.

Re: Flutter 2

#620

Interesting how Flutter has evolved from a AR/VR YC company to building cross-platform developer tools at Google. Anyone know the story behind that? https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/26/flutter-app-webcam-y-combi...

I think that's just coincidental naming, the Flutter mobile framework was founded by Eric Seidel, the Flutter AR company was founded by Navneet Dalal and Mehul Nariyawala.
Post reply on HN