Uniting Flutter on web and mobile, and introducing Flutter 1.9 | Hacker News Reader

Uniting Flutter on web and mobile, and introducing Flutter 1.9

developers.googleblog.com

36 pointsdoppp10 comments

I hope they are able to release a preview of Flutter on desktop early next year. C-interop for Dart sounds great and might be able to compensate the somewhat lacking native Dart ecosystem.

What might be the concrete use cases of C integration? ML?

I'd rather have integrated support for Wifi access (and Bluetooth), for Arduino-style Iot. Things never quite work as intended (even within an Android version).

As one concrete use case, you could use Dart FFI to call Win32 APIs that implement Flutter plugins that support Windows. You should have network access via wifi w/o any trouble today but we do have work to do to support Bluetooth better.

Chris Sells PM, Flutter developer experience

It would be really amazing if they exposed a C-based interface to flutter. Using performant flutter to target multiple platforms with languages with better library support would be killer.

Though it is understandable that google wants to cultivate their language ecosystems.

The big issue with Flutter on the Web is if the app acts like it is a part of the web, with selectable text. Otherwise it feels like an Abobe Flash substitute: good for some type of applications, not so for others.

Inspectable source code would also be desirable.

What's the status on selectable text?

Early days, but this release offers selectable text, right-click context menu provided by the browser.

During development, source code is JavaScript with source maps for debugging the original Dart code from the likes of Chrome DevTools. We also have a production compiler that generates optimized JavaScript when you're ready to deploy.

(Disclosure: I'm on the Flutter team)

« Support for bitcode » ???

I’m extremely confused. Isn’t bitcode equivalent to llvm IL ? Doesn’t dart have its own compiler ?

Dart does have it's own compiler that targets the native instruction set for supported platforms, e.g. 32-bit and 64-bit ARM for Android and iOS, x86 for Windows and macOS, etc. We're experimenting with bitcode in case Apple decides in the future that they're rather have iOS and/or macOS apps be submitted that way instead of ARM or x86, as they already have for tvOS and watchOS.

Chris Sells PM, Flutter developer experience

Why would you want to learn Fart? Useless language. If they made it work with typescript it would be a react native contender

If you're writing Dart targeting Flutter for web (flutter.dev/web) you are able to make calls into JavaScript/TypeScript.

Chris Sells PM, Flutter developer experience

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