Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

For me the project died when Google decided it wasn't worth it to support it any longer in Chrome and Angular team decided to use TypeScript instead.

Regarding Flutter, I watched the conference where it was presented and none of the devices I own was able to launch the application.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.flutter.gal...

Unless Google does actually use the language to the point a few well known companies think it is valuable to use in their own products and talk about it, e.g. "X rewrote Z in Dart", I don't see much of a future to the language.

View on HN

I feel your sentiment. But I always thought getting browsers to adopt Dart was a crazy and impossible idea. I was actually glad when I heard they had abandoned that plan.

Flutter confuses me. Its annoying you have to use their DSL for layouts rather than HTML and what about native widgets, like WebViews or VideoPlayers?

With them drastically speeding up the Dart2JS compiler and implementing a strong typed mode, I am quite pleased with Dart's direction.

I do still fear for its future. It would be really to sad to see Dart die. The last web app I made, I was able to make the entire thing in under 90kbs, including HTML, CSS, SVGs, and JS. Dart allows me to write desktop like applications for the web with any extra overhead.

> I feel your sentiment. But I always thought getting browsers to adopt Dart was a crazy and impossible idea. I was actually glad when I heard they had abandoned that plan.

I agree; a saner approach than adding one particular language at a time to browsers is to give browsers support/hooks which arbitrary language implementors can target, without having to perform gymnastics like compiling to JS.

It looks like WebAssembly is (at least the first step) in that direction, so Dart and others can use that as and when it matures, without creating a legacy of language-specific issues for future generations of Web implementors and archivists do deal with.

> But I always thought getting browsers to adopt Dart was a crazy and impossible idea.

I don't know — browsers are already planning to adopt a non-JavaScript language (WebAssembly); it's entirely possible that maybe, just maybe they might start to support more than just the late-90s mistake which is JavaScript.

As someone that enjoys more developing native apps than web ones, I imagine Web Assembly will eventually be the revenge of plugins.

How long it will take for Canvas/WebGL + WebAssembly frameworks to appear?

Eventually someones going to create a XML based layout language to use to construct views in the Canvas, we could even call it HTML ;)

I'm not a web developer either and I look forward to WASM and its potential. But I really like HTML, I've used lots of layout languages before and I think HTML is the best I've used. The only thing I find HTML to be obtuse about is complex animations.

> For me the project died when Google decided it wasn't worth it to support it any longer in Chrome and Angular team decided to use TypeScript instead.

For me too. I have spent 3-4 hours looking through the samples etc. But even with TypeScript being so popular, it's hard to find quick samples for tasks one wants to do. So investing in one more new language didn't seem that attractive.

> Unless Google does actually use the language to the point a few well known companies think it is valuable to use in their own products and talk about it

https://www.dartlang.org/community/who-uses-dart

> Regarding Flutter [...] none of the devices I own was able to launch the application.

Is it still the case that none of your devices are able to launch Flutter Galler App? In an unfortunate coincidence the build that was published to Play Store right before the Dart Summit was flawed and declared that it is incompatible with most of the devices except for latest generation ones. This was rapidly fixed - but fixed build did not get into the Play Store on time.

I just checked my Moto G 3rd generation again and it doesn't work. There is a corresponding open issue, but it makes me leery about using it for now.

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/5737

I didn't bother to test it again.

Just tried it now on a Samsung S3 (Android 4.3).

It does launch now, just the rendering is a bit wrong.

The Android Application bar overlaps with the one generated by Flutter, thus only showing the lower half.

That seems to be this bug

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/6586

Yes, that is the one.

>"X rewrote Z in Dart"

I don't believe I has any chance to happen this way.

I work on a big mobile app, I can see us adopt Kotlin, since we can mixup java and kotlin naturally (it outputs bytecode, so it is very interop). Flutter ? Even if you fix the runtime (and that's a big if), it means rewriting the whole app from scratch.

What I can see happen is google releasing Fuchsia as the future of Android and flutter on Android as a way to bridge the gap.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com