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We're forking Flutter

flutterfoundation.dev

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Re: We're forking Flutter

#81

Post by maxrmk »

kgeist wrote: post #50
maxrmk wrote: post #30

> 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...

That ethos runs through everything the WA team does. I learned a bit about it when I was at fb and I was beyond impressed by how few servers WA used for its core infrastructure. It's a really well engineered product.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#82

Post by skybrian »

Back when I worked on GWT, we had trouble accepting outside contributions because the team had a mandate to support Googlers. That is, much like other libraries and tools at Google, changes could not break google3. This means testing patches against google3 and either changing the patch, or fixing whatever code used it, and these are tasks that no outsider can do.

Shepherding these patches is no fun when you have your own changes to work on that are more important to the team.

We did something similar, by creating an external fork where changes could be tried out by the community, without necessarily being accepted into the internal version.

I think a fork could work if there was enough external momentum, but even 20 people working full time would actually be pretty good for an open source project. How many developers will this fork attract? The fork would need to attract other businesses who can put people on it.

One downside is that the code isn't tested against google3. Sometimes you find actual bugs that way.

Edit: reading more closely, the complaint doesn't seem to be that patches weren't reviewed, but rather that bug reports weren't investigated. That's definitely something outside developers could do more of, and seems a lot easier than forking?

Re: We're forking Flutter

#83

Post by igorguerrero »

plorkyeran wrote: post #21

> 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. If "only" 50 people working on a project used by one million people was unworkably low then every single successful project out there would be doomed.…

We got around 3m with seven guys, so yeah, and we don't even have on-call rotation / schedule, even though emergencies do happen from time to time. They think 1:1000 ratio is too big as well? That's crazy.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#84

Post by xster »

eseidel wrote: post #44
punduk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any statistics on how much of it is used in production?

https://flutter.dev/showcase has a few examples. Flutter is everywhere at this point. TikTok in China (Douyin), PUBG Mobile, MGM Resorts, eBay Motors, Kijiji.com, Grab are a few off the top of my head. And of course a whole bunch of Google apps (GPay, Earth, Classroom, etc.), Toyota cars, LG TVs, Google's own hardware devices, etc. Tonal is probably the app I used most often that's Flutter. Caribou Coffee, Betterment…

small nit: many daily driver apps in China are partially Flutter. But TikTok is not at the present

Re: We're forking Flutter

#85

Post by droideqa »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #70
plorkyeran wrote: post #21

> 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. If "only" 50 people working on a project used by one million people was unworkably low then every single successful project out there would be doomed.…

WhatsApp had less than 50 engineers (or was it employees total?) when Facebook bought them out, and they had millions of users.

The power of Erlang.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#86

Post by pzo »

peppertree wrote: post #58

The fork is called "flock" and it's part of "flutter foundation"? It appears they forked Google's confusing branding strategy as well.

wait for similar WordPress drama if google owns 'flutter' trademark.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#87

Post by izacus »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #70
plorkyeran wrote: post #21

> 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. If "only" 50 people working on a project used by one million people was unworkably low then every single successful project out there would be doomed.…

WhatsApp had less than 50 engineers (or was it employees total?) when Facebook bought them out, and they had millions of users.

What a bizarre comparison, WhatsApp engineers didn't have to review code for millions of users.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#89

Post by blinding-streak »

punduk wrote: post #27
eseidel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are there any statistics on how much of it is used in production?

Other anecdotal apps: Google Analytics mobile app. BetRivers online sportsbook (one of the largest in the US).
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