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Comment by deforciant | Hacker News Reader

I mostly spend my days writing Go (previously Python) and when I tried Dart I really liked it. Could basically start coding and be productive without even looking at language documentation (VSCode has a nice Dart plugin which tells you what to do and what not to do).

In my case, I was trying out Dart because of a Flutter (probably majority of people are now looking at Dart because of Flutter) and I found it really fantastic. I love the tooling where you can just use their CLI to build/test the application without complex IDEs like XCode or Android Studio.

If you want to try building a mobile app then definitely go for Flutter+Dart, even if you don't need to support both Android and iOS I think it's just much more easy to start with than alternatives (RN/Swift/Android Java).

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How does your experience with Dart compare to TypeScript in VS Code? I haven’t tried Dart yet but my TS experience sounds similar to what you described.

I tried to like TypeScript a bit more than a year ago but couldn't, maybe I should give it another chance. I mostly do my frontend development in Vue.js so even though it supports TypeScript, I never found any need for it (I use typed Props to pass data between the components) as I try to make my UI as thin as possible, just fetching some data from the backend and displaying it. You can have a look at my project- https://webhookrelay.com (management UI is under my.webhookrelay.com), so far made it quite simple, material UI and only a little bit of JS.

Obviously coming from Go to frontend I think I would benefit a lot from TypeScript.. Maybe one day :)

> If you want to try building a mobile app then definitely go for Flutter+Dart, even if you don't need to support both Android and iOS I think it's just much more easy to start with than alternatives (RN/Swift/Android Java).

How is it easier? You can literally start your React Native development by opening up https://expo.io and scan a QR on your phone.

I prefer something that you can build yourself so expo wasn't an option for me. Plus, I think most of the platforms one day (might be soon) will ban these services as they can deliver code to the app after it has been approved.

With Flutter it's super easy, they have a CLI that creates an initial boilerplate for your code that you can compile and deploy to your phone in just a single command with hot reload enabled. I guess it makes it easier even than expo as you don't have to scan anything on your phone :)

Wait... we were talking about ease of access right?

Just re-reading the getting started guide for flutter, you need a set of tools, the flutter SDK, xcode etc.

That's not one command.

The same goes for React Native, you need node and xcode for building locally just like with flutter.

I am talking about the advantage expo offers to try React Native without any tools.

Heck you could try it in an iPad only if you'd want.

I didn't find it hard to set up, it's just once CLI that also has "flutter doctor" command that tells you if something is wrong. Since I already had XCode (as I was doing some work on Swift) and Android Studio, I didn't find it even a little bit annoying :)

What really made the difference for me was their CLI to build and run the app + batteries included approach where the router is available out of the box and you don't need to look through some GitHub projects on how to implement routing and authentication in your app. That wasn't the case with RN.

Also, in this setup, all the infrastructure is in your computer, no need for a cloud service like Expo. However, I do agree with you that if you just want to try something simple, it will be easier with it, it's just how much can you trust that service and why would you for something more serious?

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