> Communication monoculture
This point seems like a callout to a certain discussion and I kind of want to see it
We're forking Flutter
71–80 of 748 posts
Re: We're forking Flutter
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's 200k weekly downloads of node on npm. I’m pretty sure Node developers usually don’t install Node from npm.
Does nvm not use npm internally?
Github shows 98% of code is "Shell" on top of that there are also many different package managers that people use: fnm, volta that are build with rust. You can also install nodejs using homebrew.
Re: We're forking Flutter
#73They estimate there are one million Flutter developers/users. Have I been sleeping under a rock?
Flutter founder here. When I led the Google team we had pretty good analytics. `flutter` was for a long time opt-out with analytics and would phone home to Google and report usage. We filtered out docker containers and things that looked like CI and saw usage near 1M monthly actives when I left Google a couple years ago. I'm sure it's up since then. There are 10s of millions of web developers in the world. Doesn't sh…
Thank you for creating my favorite app framework.
That said, I literally only use Flutter as a hobbyist.
I made a basic web game for a friend, and a small web app that helps me manage my music lyric videos. I ultimately picked Flutter because I find it easier than actually building websites.
Dart is amazing.
But I'm not deploying to millions of users. At most 10 people have seen my Flutter apps.
It's VERY good for creating quick crud apps with Firebase.
Just counting the number of us who have it installed and might of spun up hello world says nothing about it's actual market share.
To be clear, I absolutely love Flutter, but it's still not something I really see job listings for.
Dart is great too BTW.
Re: We're forking Flutter
#74Flutter is truly a piece of great tech with remarkable quality and value. I hope the right path will be found. I think companies using it for commercial purposes (like what we're doing) should contribute something to the effort to help make sure Flutter not only survives, but flourishes. Bug bounties, supporting individual developers, supporting efforts and initiatives, professional services, or any other way that he…
> Flutter is truly a piece of great tech with remarkable quality and value. How does it compare to React Native from user and developer experience perspectives? Are there other competitors?
It's better in most ways, for example, just recently LG decided to rewrite its TV apps from RN to Flutter
https://webostv.developer.lge.com/news/2024-07-15-new-and-su...
> Most of our apps use React. When we first adopted React, we were pleased with the development productivity it provided, but sadly its initial performance was subpar in terms of start-up time, memory consumption, and responsiveness. After significant and complicated optimizations we reached performance benchmarks that were good enough, and yet we desired a new technology that was both fast and simple.
> To our delight, our very first prototype with Flutter easily exceeded our target benchmarks! Without any optimization whatsoever, our Flutter rewrite launched twice as fast as our original app, consumed less runtime memory, and felt more responsive and playful to use
Re: We're forking Flutter
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's 200k weekly downloads of node on npm. I’m pretty sure Node developers usually don’t install Node from npm.
Does nvm not use npm internally?
>Does nvm not use npm internally?
No. It downloads binaries from nodejs.org. There is no "official" canonical means of managing Node versions. It's just a grab bag of community tools like NVM.
Re: We're forking Flutter
#76> That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000. Doing a little bit of division, that means that every single member of the Flutter team is responsible for the needs of 20,000 Flutter developers! That ratio is clearly unworkable for any semblance of customer support. Back when I worked on .net we had fewer than 50 people maintaining a product that shipped to over a billion machines. If you opened an issue on github…
WhatsApp once had just 50 engineers with 900M users: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
What more do you need?
That's still plenty of people if you got a few thousand people at AWS/Azure or in this case Meta's in-house cloud making sure your service is running and scaling as it should.
Re: We're forking Flutter
#77Weird, I'd never heard of Flutter (or at least it never registered), but then I'm an infra engineer, so why would I have? But particularly strange is that if you go to flutter.dev, you'll notice you can't find anything about who Flutter is. There's no about page with links to the people behind it, or any indication of what company sponsors it.
Then this flutterfoundation.dev site... weirdly also doesn't say who's behind it. Presumably some outside folks? Maybe just the one person who wrote this blog post? But if it's called "Flutter Foundation" I would expect it to be more officially sanctioned?
Were I in the market for a UI framework, none of this would make me feel very confident.
Re: We're forking Flutter
#78> Imagine that you're the engineering director, or CTO of a company whose next release is blocked by some Flutter bug. What do you do if the team won't work on that bug for 2 years?
Then you fix the bug? If your team can't then pay a consultant who can? Isn't it open source? What did I miss?
Re: We're forking Flutter
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it is. I was just thinking about what happened when other companies did something similar.
Didn't Google suddenly kill GWT, which is a bit like flutter?
No, it transitioned it to others after signaling it would for well over a year, so i don't think you could call it sudden:
"In 2011 with the introduction of the Dart programming language, Google stated that GWT would continue to be supported for the foreseeable future while also hinting at a possible rapprochement between the two Google approaches to structured web programming. However, they also mentioned that several of the engineers previously working on GWT are now working on Dart.[6]
In 2012 at their annual I/O conference, Google announced that GWT would be transformed from a Google project to a fully open-sourced project.[7]
In July 2013, Google posted on its GWT blog that the transformation to an open-source project was completed.[8]"
Google funded/helped for some number of years after that.
It still is going, afaik, with gwt 2.11 being released in january, 2024.