Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Wow, talk about burying the lede. I'm not sure how I feel about Google's so-called "ambient computing" idea that they were all about at this year's Google I/O, but Flutter being championed for desktop and web are huge! Does this mean the end of Electron, finally? They say it runs on macOS, I hope they get to Windows and Linux soon.

I built a little Android/iOS app in Flutter and it was a real delight. I didn't especially like Dart at first, but it was easy enough to pick up and then got out of the way more or less. I'd love to be able to easily run an app like that on the web. I know Dart's original vision was to replace JS but it seems they backed off that a bit. But it sounds like it's back on the menu!

I don't know if this changes anything exactly, in terms of what Flutter can do right now. I think web/desktop have always sort of been there. But what's new for me is this perspective that they intend to support other devices beyond mobile. I wasn't really sure about that before, since it seemed mostly tailored to just iOS/Android when I was working with it.

> I know Dart's original vision was to replace JS but it seems they backed off that a bit.

More than "a bit" - replacing JS hasn't been the goal for several years now.

+1 for flutter being really fun to work with. Its the most fun I have ever had working on mobile.

Microsoft's team for "React Native for Windows" and now "React Native for macOS", keep showing benchmarks how resource hungry Electron is versus C++, C# and React Native.

So I keep hoping that they could eventually trigger a move from Electron to React Native for VS Code, the only Electron app I care to waste my time on.

> Does this mean the end of Electron, finally?

If it's a much smaller footprint, memory and CPU wise, it could be. Also depends on how easy it is to learn the language/framework and how easy it is to deploy to multiple platforms. That lack of friction is what makes Electron so devilishly popular.

Last year I was able to get a simple HN browser app running on both desktop Linux (Ubuntu) and Windows 10 as well. They weren't perfect, but I'm certain support is even better now.

I don't know how well they're supporting desktop and web UI idioms yet, but it looks like you can try out Flutter on the web using DartPad:

https://medium.com/dartlang/a-brand-new-dartpad-dev-with-flu...

Flutter already offically supports web and is a compilable target by default. You don't need dartpad. It is still on beta.

https://flutter.dev/web

I doubt flutter will be significantly leaner for real world, full featured apps, like slack. After all flutter is reusing Chrome's building blocks, with Skia and many other render related libraries, with similar IPC architecture for security, etc. They've replaced the js run-time with dart.

See download sizes here [1], if they remind you electron app sizes [2], it's because flutter is a slimmer (not by much) Chrome.

Flutter will suffer from huge update sizes like electron, but may be faster out of the box, and slimmer (not by much) in RAM. However, using Carlo [3] or Lorca [4] can yield similar benefits, without learning dart, or dealing with brand new flutter edge cases solved years ago elsewhere. In my opinion, flutter is not yet a better mouse trap for desktop apps, and even for mobile, ionic 4 is plenty performant

[1]: https://github.com/flutter/samples/releases/tag/gallery-v2.0

[2]: https://central.github.com/deployments/desktop/desktop/lates...

[3]: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo

[4]: https://github.com/zserge/lorca

Another thing is that Flutter is Dart's Rails, and I learned several times not to be stuck with a framework specific language.

On the other hand, I bet JetPack Composer, and the app reloading reboot, would never had happened if the Android team wasn't continuously being asked about what they think about Flutter on Q&A sessions.

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