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Comment by jerry1979 | Hacker News Reader

jerry1979

I would like to know which ui library they use.

Perhaps Flutter. It uses Canvas to render in the web.

Flutter web can use both DOM and Canvas, but the default is Canvas. I haven't to this day seen any disadvantages of using Canvas though, possibly speed on slow mobile devices.

They are using canvas for the document rendering, not for the UI which surrounds it.

They want faster performance and more accuracy for typography and layout of the user's document on the screen.

I want to say that Flutter would be a good candidate, but I don't think it's ready for this. Or is it?

Isn't Flutter intended exactly for this use case? If Google Docs won't use Flutter then I'd say Flutter has failed badly.

I'm a Flutter dev and last time I checked out the web target it resulted in massive bundle sizes and bad performance. This was a couple of months or so ago, but still after their "official" 2.0 release which took web from beta feature to stable.

EDIT: Removed hyperbole: performance was bad, but not unusable

I guess Flutter matters mostly to Ad Words team, as they rescued Dart from falling appart.

It remains to be seen how much long lasting love it is having across the Googleplex.

I don't think that's true. Flutter is having a shitload of momentum right now. Just recently Canonical embraced Flutter as a first class option for building Wayland apps. Flutter is running on Google hardware such as smart speakers. Of course you also have the ever-looming Fuchsia OS that will have Flutter as the premier toolkit for apps. Etc. etc.

Like Ubuntu Touch?

Desktop. Don't know about Touch, but one would assume it carries over at some point.

I mean with the same adoption success.

What? Ubuntu Touch is an OS. Flutter is just a GUI framework, like Qt. Not sure what you're trying to say.

That Flutter is nowhere to be seen beyond As Words, the new buggy Google Pay, and a couple of cases that Google sponsored to show something in stage during Flutter conferences.

And Flutter isn't even something that the whole company buys into, hence the counter movement from Android team and JetBrains with Compose or the whole PWA and Fungus Project from Chrome team.

Fuchsia remains to be seen if it is going to be another Android or follow Brillo's footsteps.

Flutter is used in an increasing number of production apps. I'm getting frequent recruitment offers for Flutter roles. So regardless of any skepticism you might have for the longevity of the project, saying that it's only relevant for the Ad Words people is just not true. It's being adopted, and being embraced, way outside of the googleplex.

If they don't use Flutter, then myself and Flutter community and Flutter Googlers will all be very disappointed.

I am also wondering about this. Having recently built a production app in Flutter Web used by millions of people, I am very eager to hear about other people's experiences with Flutter Web in real life applications.

I've been coding Flutter mobile apps for a couple of years, but have only toyed around with the web target. In my experience it seemed kinda off. Scrolling lists ignored my native scroll speed and janked, text manipulation felt laggy, etc. It reminded me of the good old horrible days when Flash-based websites was widespread. I tested it right after the 2.0 release, so perhaps they've fixed it since.

EDIT: Also IIRC the bundle size of a release bundle was like 3mb which was a big yikes.

Yeah that was our primary risk - the actual main.dart.js file becoming too large. We host the JS asset on Cloudfront and the web app from somewhere else, which makes it much better. As far as Flutter Web itself, I only think it became production ready for the web in the last 3 months - literally! It was a bit of a risky choice, but it worked out well for us.

I'm glad it worked out! It's a nice framework to work with, and Dart is a pleasant language. How big is your bundle size atm, if I might ask?

About 2.1M, and it comes down to 624K gzipped which I feel is pretty acceptable. The whole app is about 6000 lines of dart.

>seemed kinda off

Yes. And that's exactly why it's important for Google to eat their own dogfood.

I mean, yeah. But rolling it out to millions of users wouldn't really pass as dogfooding, though?

Unless there's been a large rewrite, it's likely Closure Library: https://developers.google.com/closure/library

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