We're forking Flutter • Hacker News Board

Re: We're forking Flutter

#91

Post by adamc » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 8:24 PM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #53

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.…

these are also 50 google devs (that may or may not be at the company anymore) by this estimate. They could have just said there were critical tickets not addressed by Gooogle and their PR's ignored, and would have gotten a much more sympathetic response.

Even though they didn't say, that was my assumption. Why would they bother, otherwise? And that's not wrong.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#92

Post by kgeist » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 8:24 PM UTC

flawn wrote: post #59

punduk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you have an Android phone, get FlutterShark and check which of your installed apps use Flutter. It's a surprising amount actually. For example, I just recently discovered that Supercell uses Flutter for their Supercell-ID flow.

FlutterShurk says 3 apps on my phone use Flutter. Device Info (a different app) reports that's 0.2% of all my apps...

Re: We're forking Flutter

#93

Post by l11r » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 8:25 PM UTC

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...

As far as I know Telegram has around the same number of engineers even today, handling around the same size userbase.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#94

Post by munificent » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 8:26 PM UTC

skywhopper wrote: post #77

Weird, 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 beh…

> But particularly strange is that if you go to flutter.dev, you'll notice you can't find anything about who Flutter is.

It's on the front page: "A Global Open Source Community. Supported by Google, open to everyone."

Re: We're forking Flutter

#95

Post by jwildeboer » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 8:26 PM UTC

How many people are the “we” this blog post talks about? 5 people? 500?

Re: We're forking Flutter

#96

Post by philshem » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 8:26 PM UTC

concerndc1tizen wrote: post #36

throwaway19972 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than using a distinct name for a mostly-identical project or effort (looking at you, MariaDB).

"MariaDB is named after Widenius' younger daughter, Maria. (MySQL is named after his other daughter, My.)" (Wikipedia)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Widenius

Re: We're forking Flutter

#97

Post by eseidel » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 8:27 PM UTC

skywhopper wrote: post #77

Weird, 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 beh…

Well, myself and a few hundred other contributors are behind Flutter. Happy to answer questions.

The flutter.dev page got rewritten to be more "marketing friendly" a few years back. docs.flutter.dev is still maintained by the engineers however.

Regarding who exactly contributes to Flutter, it's all on GitHub, so you can see the actual committers, e.g. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/graphs/contributors https://github.com/flutter/engine/graphs/contributors https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/graphs/contributors

As for flutterfoundation.dev, it appears to be just Matt? Who used to be employed at Google and reported to me on the Flutter team but is no longer.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#98

Post by steve_adams_86 » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 8:28 PM UTC

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.

WhatsApp has a very narrow use case and feature set to support. Flutter is a multi-platform framework for developing apps like WhatsApp. It seems like a apples and oranges here.

Re: We're forking Flutter

#99

Post by giancarlostoro » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 8:28 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #87

giancarlostoro wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is it bizarre to compare the impact of a low number of engineers affecting millions of people. In the case of WhatsApp it was 35 engineers affecting 350 million people.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447564

Re: We're forking Flutter

#100

Post by ckastner » Mon, Oct 28, 2024, 8:28 PM UTC

> flutterfoundation.dev

It's not Flutter by own admission, it's very likely not backed by a foundation, and I highly doubt that Google consented to its "Flutter" trademark used for such a foundation.