Flutter doesn’t need Kotlin (or anything else) | Hacker News Reader

Flutter doesn’t need Kotlin (or anything else)

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31 pointsjaxondu20 comments

I absolutely love Flutter! It feels like what Android development should be like in todays day.

No XML or descriptive interface mumbo jumbo. You write your interface purely programmatically and it's easy to read afterwards. It also looks very good and supports most of Material Design's components. Great built-in library. Dart has some very neat features. I especially love the handling of asynchronies operations. Either use promises or the async and await syntax.

>You write your interface purely programmatically and it's easy to read afterwards.

Personally, I disagree. For more complex UI, having XML and designer is way better option than writing UI programmatically.

Yep, coming from Delphi, C++ Builder, Forms and quite a few good Java layout designers (Netbeans Matisse), WPF Blend, I never understood what is so cool about doing UIs by hand.

Particularly if you have access to things like custom components (that are themselves designed with a visual designer) and visual form inheritance; these give you back hierarchical compositional tools that you would otherwise lose in a flat composition.

I think the sub second hot reload feature, makes it cool. Have a look at the "Unified layout" section in https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf and or install the flutter plugin in vs code or android studio and have a play.

Makes it cool, but nothing out of the ordinary for anyone used to other native GUI development tools, like the ones I referred to.

Here is Interface Builder in 1986, https://paulhammant.com/2013/03/28/interface-builders-altern...

Complex UI are precisely the place where purely programmatic UI is a time saver.

You are going to need to do A/B testing of UI, code review, testing, accessibility/localization, and a crap ton of composability. All these are a pain when you have XML.

Actually I think it is more the case of Dart needing Flutter, as its last hope of getting some kind of relevant adoption outside Googleplex.

Yeah, is sad that React Native/ Flutter/NativeScript can't be used directly without the JS/Dart non-sense. It kill the "its native" with a poorly interface.

Dart offers the static types and traditional classes of Java with the closures, first class functions, rapid iteration, and other nice parts of JS. Dart is a very nice middle ground in my opinion. Dart now supports AOT compilation too.

Flutter is a lightweight declarative UI on top of Skia with hooks into the relevant native events. That means it should generally be easier to get good performance than with React Native (not to mention replacing Android's horrible UI architecture that seems designed to prevent 60fps from happening). Once you start talking about going cross-platform, you have to start talking about compromises. Flutter seems like a very nice compromise when compared to the alternatives (only thing it's missing is the ability to compile to either HTML or Canvas).

So, how "easy" is to interface flutter with swift/java/xamarin or similar?

I could live with a "small" dls if is constrained to UI rendering and let me do the logic on a more native lang...

There's been a C dart FFI for years. Communicating with whichever other system shouldn't be any harder than the next language. None of those would be my first choice though. The less platform specific code you write, the fewer platform specific issues you'll be dealing with. Plus xamarin isn't native anywhere.

With Flutter apps using the AOT, performance should already be good. Here's an interesting real world comparison between libsass (a C library) and dartsass.

https://github.com/sass/dart-sass/blob/master/perf.md

From the Flutter FAQ

https://flutter.io/faq/#

> How does Flutter run my code on Android?

> The engine’s C/C++ code is compiled with Android’s NDK, and any Dart code is AOT-compiled into native code. The app runs using the native instruction set (no interpreter is involved).

> How does Flutter run my code on iOS?

> The engine’s C/C++ code is compiled with LLVM, and any Dart code is AOT-compiled into native code. The app runs using the native instruction set (no interpreter is involved).

> Can I access platform services and APIs like sensors and local storage?

> Yes. Flutter gives developers out-of-the-box access to some platform-specific services and APIs from the operating system. However, we want to avoid the “lowest common denominator” problem with most cross-platform APIs, so we do not intend to build cross-platform APIs for all native services and APIs.

> A number of platform services and APIs have ready-made packages available in the Pub repository. Using an existing package is easy.

> Finally, we encourage developers to use Flutter’s asynchronous message passing system to create your own integrations with platform and third-party APIs. Developers can expose as much or as little of the platform APIs as they need, and build layers of abstractions that are a best fit for their project.

An entire article about flutter and I have no idea what it is.

It's a mobile UI framework for creating Android and iOS applications from the same code base.

Here is a good introductory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq4N0hgOWzU

And the UI engine on Fuchsia.

Won’t these apps end up looking and feeling like Android apps and be out of place on iOS?

Flutter has the builtin ability to mimic platform conventions (Android on Android, iOS on iOS), which includes scrolling, animations, fonts, etc.

If you have an Android phone you can download Flutter Gallery app from Play Store, go to the menu and flip behavior from Android to iOS. Suddenly you have an app that behaves like an iOS app. Here is a demo like that from the early days: https://youtu.be/Mx-AllVZ1VY?t=11m23s

Flutter is a mobile SDK from Google for building UIs using Dart. Dart is a programming language from Google, initially designed to replace Javascript. It's optionally typed and fixes many JS annoyances.

https://flutter.io https://www.dartlang.org/

Dart 2.0 is strongly typed with inference.

Now it allows for AOT and JIT on its Compiler Toolchain.

And not a single link either. Might as well have been in a book.

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