I've used both Flutter and React Native. Hands down, Flutter is the more enjoyable experience. Everything from the language, to the toolkit, to the IDE, to the final product, is just BETTER.
React Native is a bloated, hacky, slow, garbage pile by comparison.
I see so many rave reviews.
But I personally tried it and strongly disliked it. The toolkit and Android Studio run horribly slow - like really slow. And the output is basically this generation's flash. Some of the samples I tried on their gallery are mediocre. Very slight, but noticeable sluggishness. Some are just terrible; the 2d transformations moves at like 7fps. Plus there are so many other small things like issues with scrollbars, things that take time to sort out that native and web have had time to figure out. Also dart is a real PITA coming from typescripts which is basically c#.
Actually, the issue with dart is it's own whole thing. It was meant to be an alternative to js, but not ts has taken over with much greater success. I am not talking about aot or stuff like that - just the dev experience for app dev. Now it's in this really weird spot.
I just don't know. I would honestly have thought that flutter is dead in the water - every personal experience I've had with it has been bad, there are objective facts about it that are bad, and yet so many people love it.
I'd be interested to hear your experience about why that is.
https://github.com/dotnet/designs/blob/main/accepted/2020/fo...
- The performance of production builds is really good, better than any other cross-platform solution including web apps, PWAs, react native. I've got flutter apps running great on my cheap, old (circa 2015) phone with android 6.0. That's also a huge benefit of flutter, it can target older phones because it doesn't have many dependencies on native widgets etc, it just need a canvas to render.
- Dart not being a successful alternative to js(dart2js compiler), doesn't mean it's a bad language. In fact, Dart 2.0 was a serious update and the language now is great, with sane defaults and a nice standard library. I can't imagine any serious developer who knows at least one popular programming language like java,js,c# that would have problem with Dart. It's very easy to get used to it a couple of hours
> there are objective facts about it that are bad, and yet so many people love it.
can you elaborate more about those facts?
- The production builds of RN apps can be on par with fully native applications as well. Discord for iOS is entirely React Native and is probably the most performant app that I use on a daily basis.
Just like Common Lisp and Smalltalk, and now being added to WPF/WinUI, SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose,....
> Also dart is a real PITA coming from typescripts which is basically c#.
That's surprising to me. Coming from Ruby Dart was great. Not better, but when you are expecting a tuned up javascript Dart was such a nice surprise. I'd have expected it'd be the same for someone coming from C#. You worked with a current version and gave it a fair shot?
I'm in the Flutter is great camp. The UI you produce with it work great, and the whole process is great. Very powerful and at the same time manageable, a smart small concept at its core, with much around it that makes it powerful. Combine it with GetX and the code you get can also be really nice.
But for Linux? No way, not until they have got a proper beta that is not tied to snap. But maybe Sony is working on that and showing it here? Or I'm just not aware that this is not a real requirement, despite the website making it sound that way?
Eventually I hope to bring Flutter to C#, Haxe, and (maybe stretching it) eventually Kotlin, Java and Scala.
When I started to learn the language, it was being hyped as a viable alternative for Android apps (which has been abandoned since 2.10, IRCC).
Kotlin seems nice, but after getting used to a stronger type system, it's hard to go back.
Like this? https://pub.dev/packages/starflut
"A new flutter plugin project, which supports flutter to interact with other scripting languages such as python, java, ruby, golang, rust, etc. It is easy to use, supports android and ios platform."
Full warning, I have zero experience with this plugin and zero experience with Flutter.
As far as I can tell, starflut appears to offer basic script running with pass through of primitive types from Dart -> guest languages.
Hydro-SDK strives to offer far deeper integration between Dart -> guest languages up to and including extending from Dart classes in guest languages, and passing instances seamlessly back and forth with little overhead.
But this is exactly what happened to Angular. There is a TypeScript version (fairly popular) and a Dart version (barely used outside of Google but is used for some of their biggest money making projects like AdWords).
I’ve only recently discovered Dart having come from Ruby land for the last 8 years and I could easily see Dart becoming my new go-to language in the future.
I think it’s currently criminally underrated and sadly doesn’t have a huge amount of adoption outside of Flutter at the moment but I’m looking to build my next serious web backend with it.
If you’re looking for a good introduction as to why I think it’s such a good language this video does a decent job of explaining the benefits https://youtu.be/J5DQRPRBiFI
I'm doing everything Flutter related with vim + CLI, so one doesn't have to work with android studio, even did so when trying a native Windows build (out of interest) a bit ago.
> And the output is basically this generation's flash.
I did some flash quite a while ago, and no that does not compare at al, similar to that it is not like Java. The closed comparison is possible Qt, from a built output.
> Some of the samples I tried on their gallery are mediocre.
That's true, and I never understood why they don't improve that, it hurts their publicity.
> I would honestly have thought that flutter is dead in the water - every personal experience I've had with it has been bad, there are objective facts about it that are bad, and yet so many people love it.
I thought about roughly the same a year and a half ago, a coworker then did some small private stuff with it, and we talked here and then, as the base premise still sounded interesting. Comparing it now to then it just shows how much improved and gives a glimpse to what more will be possible, and I now could imagine that it will stay and even become rather useful.
tldr; It's IMO far from dead in the water, but there's also quite a bit of work to do.
I used to think the same of React Native a couple years ago but this year I picked it up again and was shocked how far its come - incredibly smooth experience, far better ecosystem, and it's hard (impossible?) to beat Chrome DevTools + VSCode. Runs fast, too.
The thing is, Flutter is a no-go for the web as of now, it delivers a huge bloated bundle that's not accessible or performant. But with React Native you can build an app that shares 90% of the code across all native platforms and the web, and feels/is more native on each of the three platforms.
1. Value types
2. Tuples
3. Key paths
4. Checked exceptions (could be more powerful in Swift, but they are there, and when not used in excess they are actually pretty nice, and Swift's `try` syntax is excellent)
5. Swift's enums and `switch` feel both more straightforward and more powerful than Kotlin's sealed classes and `when` (I'm not sure about this, but I think there are situations where you get better coverage checking with Swift's pattern matching.)
6. Reified generics (I know that opinions on this vary, and it doesn't often matter, but I've been just writing some code where it's been nice to be slightly more type safe with Any values)
7. More principled null handling (Optional is just an enum, although with some extra syntactic support)
8. `if let`, `if case`, `guard let` and `guard case` allow for simpler handling of multiple values than Kotlin's `?.let` and null checks
I like Kotlin being more expression oriented, but in the end I often find my Swift code to be less contorted due to the more powerful conditional constructs. GC vs ARC isn't much of an issue, both work for me.