A month of Flutter: a look back | Hacker News Reader

A month of Flutter: a look back

bendyworks.com

107 pointsabraham35 comments

For those betting on Fuchsia to help Flutter's adoption, work has started to create an UI compositor that is framework agnostic and there is a prototype of a Rust based UI.

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/garnet/+/master/docs/ui/sce...

https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/garnet/+/0a214f5721d723a7d0...

And Android is being ported to Fuchsia, similarly to what happened to ChromeOS and Brillo.

https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/fuchsia

So you're saying you don't believe Fuchsia will lead to increased flutter use because there will be other options?

If someone uses Fuchsia it will help.

I mean React-Native works with Android, Windows, iOS, WebVR, PDF, TVOS and whatnot, just because it also works with some other obscure platform it doesn't guarantee a high adoption.

Yes.

I expect just like it happened with Brillo and its C++ Frameworks, reborn as Android Things, Google will replace Flutter by something with more mainstream market acceptance, and the UI agnostic composition engine is paving the way for that decision.

How does this relate to e.g. compositors based on wayland? Is it that other compositors mostly see rectangles, whereas Scenic also sees scenegraph nodes within the client rectangles?

The rise of Flutter makes a lot of sense when you think about how mobile has evolved over the last 5 years.

The days of Instapaper and the like where you could build a really good app and sell it, are long since past. Nowadays I'm not sure it's really possible to make money as an app startup. Your best bet is probably releasing a game and being the one-in-a-million that goes viral.

Other than that, apps are the purview of existing big companies, and those mostly are concerned with lowering costs (since margins on mobile are so thin). With that being the case, something like Flutter that gives you a fairly good cross-platform experience are going to thrive.

It's sort of like Java in the enterprise. It doesn't matter if it's pleasant to use. There's a clearpath towards success, it's safe for cheaper developers to use and not screw things up to bad. It will never be the hot thing but it doesn't need to be; that's not its target demographic.

Flutter is trying to be Dart's killer app, while playing political wars with the ChromeOS (PWA) and Android teams.

Meanwhile Fuschia is showing signs to adopt a plugable UI support via the Scenic graphics composition engine.

I think one flaw in your analysis is that Flutter is not analogous to "Java in the enterprise": it's already very pleasant to use compared with modern web frameworks.

Java 11 is pretty sweet, and the JEPs roadmap is enticing.

Meanwhile Dart has adopted all the features I dislike in Java, like @Override instead of proper keyword, virtual methods by default, no value types and so forth.

Maybe by Android ZuchiniBread we'll be able to use Java 11 on Android.

One of the major pain points of Android development is that the vast majority of the API is designed around limitations of Java 6. Yes, I know that you can use most of Java 8 for Android now, and Kotlin is pretty good. However, it took far too long for Google to deliver that to developers.

Google has played a J++ on Java developers, with Google wanabee employees always arguing for such action.

However, Java 9 support is already ongoing on AOSP, so we might still get some good news by Google IO 2019.

In any case, even if Kotlin turns out to be the future of Android, it is much more worthwhile language than Dart, in features, backends and CV value.

App Store revenue would seem to disagree with you on this.

The vast majority of App Store revenue is games.

> The days of Instapaper and the like where you could build a really good app and sell it, are long since past.

We've had the opposite experience with Halide, which launched in 2017 in a crowded category.

This is all well and good until Apple bans these lowest common denominator cross platform frameworks. I hope they do this once Marzipan is shipping.

It's also not true that app startups aren't making money.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/headspace-vs-calm-the-meditatio...

I doubt Apple would ever ban frameworks like these. There is a guideline against poorly designed apps, but it is almost never enforced.

I would not be surprised if they did. After all, Apple put terrible things like desktop Java and Flash out of their (and our) misery. This sounds like yet another iteration of Swing, a technology to develop GUI programs that could, at best, look subtly wrong on every platform.

Like a game engine, Flutter draws every pixel, compiles to native arm code, so you can create a custom design across android and ios or use the supplied material design and ios widgets.

Also they had an event in London last month, if you don't know much about flutter, there is this 11 minute recap of that event. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-o4BqJxmJE

The... "rise" of Flutter? According to which metric?

Flutter is nonexistent outside Google employees and a handful of Flutter advocates who write books or blog posts about it.

The performance and tool chain penalty of flutter makes absolutely zero sense today, when so many better alternatives exist.

Disclosure: I'm one of those Google employees.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to say it's non-existent outside of Google; curious to know what made you feel so negatively about it.

Flutter is one of the top 30 most starred repos on Github (top 20 if you exclude non-software content); given that it wasn't even in the top 100 six months ago, I think most would agree it's growing pretty quickly. And even though it's only been out of beta for three weeks, it's used by large companies from Alibaba to Square to Capital One. Examples like this [1] show that it's fully capable of delivering game-quality experiences even on older devices, since it compiles directly to ARM code and uses the Skia graphics engine.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.two_dimens...

> it's fully capable of delivering game-quality experiences

I find it interesting you mention this, rather than something like “well designed”. Seems appropriate for a framework that draws UI itself, much like a game would.

I went to a Google Flutter meetup a few weeks ago and was impressed by it ... key advantage in my view is that its skinnable and builds its UI from scratch - a lot of apps will be ok with that and in fact its a bonus if they look exactly the same on both major platforms.

> Flutter is one of the top 30 most starred repos on Github (top 20 if you exclude non-software content); given that it wasn't even in the top 100 six months ago, I think most would agree it's growing pretty quickly.

Are Github stars a valid metric for use? Personally, I have ~280 repos starred, and all of those stars are bookmarks. "Cute, I might use it one day".

I can see how it is getting traction.

Static-typed java lite language, near-native, cross-platform support. There is a lot to like. And there aren't many alternatives out there, if you consider cross-platform compilation a must. React Native and alikes suffer even greater performance related issues.

The only thing currently blocking Flutter, is the ecosystem. But for some presentation centric apps that need functional yet consistent UI, Flutter is pretty competitive solution.

What is somewhat a little concerning is, unlike React has JSX to relatively easily to compose components, at least in a fashion that is easy to tell the hierarchy, Flutter seems to opt for deeply nested parentheses, which results in lengthy code and isn't very friendly to the eyes.

There's also Xamarin which should allow for close to native performance, provides a native user experience and allows for a lot of code sharing between iOS and Android. And, it's also proven tech. I also like that Xamarin follows up on new iOS and Android releases really quickly.

Yeah forget Flutter, every dev I spoke with said it’s a joke. They shared similar feelings : only Google is pushing for it.

Chrome and Angular dropping Dart 1.0 was a lesson.

I will only bother with Dart 2.x and Flutter if Google actually replaces Android frameworks with it, and makes it unavoidable.

For iOS/Android apps, PWAs, Xamarin, Qt, React Native, Unity/Unreal, SDL, SFML, Cocos2d-x, Godot are much more appealing with CV worthy programming languages.

>CV worthy programming languages.

What do you mean by this? Like languages that are worth putting on your CV because recruiters or did I misunderstand?

Languages that are worthy to put on the CV, because of customers, employers and recruiters.

According to the "Stack Overflow Flutter questions" metric:

http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[ionic-framework,react-native,f...

Also according to the "number of Flutter jobs posted on jobstreet.co.uk". Three months ago it was 5 [0] now it's 13. For reference the number of React Native jobs has grown from 43 to 74. Let's see where things stand in another 3 months.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18029570

Here is the stackoverflow trend chart Fwiw.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=flutter%2Crea...

My limited experience with Flutter made a very good first impression.

It doesn’t seem you know what flutter is:) performance and tool chain is orders of magnitude better than the alternatives. Please try it out. I am a go, python, js dev and I find flutter offering the best developer UX

I was really surprised at how dev.to drove traffic. I've never used the site before, does anyone have any experience with it / any good communities to get started with?

I made an account recently. The content is pretty basic and quality posts are few and far in between.

If you are looking for a growing community, it looks like a good place to post, since competition isn't that hard.

There are a lot of people there that are relatively new to development so you'll find a large % of the content targeted at that market. That being said, the community is very welcoming and also has it's share of experienced developers looking for advanced topics.

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