Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjnoakes | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to play with Flutter but issues like this keep me at arm's length. Hopefully when this kind of thing is finally resolved I'll be able to give it a closer look.

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/6827

View on HN

To summarize, Flutter provides no automated or easy means to save/restore state when Android auto-kills the app (e.g. because of low memory). The main problem here is that the `onSaveInstanceState` and `onRestoreInstanceState` lifecycle callbacks require a synchronous response (return value) but the IPC system between Dart and native code is inherently asynchronous.

React Native currently has the very same problem. This is the reason why some very useful native components that require synchronous delegate callbacks (such as UITableView and UICollectionView from iOS) are not available from RN. However, the core team at Facebook is working on a "large re-architecture" that will allow synchronous calls into JS, fixing these issues:

https://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2018/06/14/stat...

State restoration pretty damn important too. Say for example, the user goes into multi-window on Android. If they were doing anything important on the screen, that would just be wiped out.

While it's common to restart on all sorts of config changes like multiwindow or layout changes on Android, flutter specifically configures it's android activity to not restart. So going into multiwindow works just fine, and the framework handles redrawing and resizing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com