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Comment by holonomically | Hacker News Reader

Frontend is what will get you. The kids have decided everything now needs to be compiled and transpiled so you won't be able to avoid the hassle of frontend development. If you want to avoid all of that then Flutter/Dart might be a good option: https://dart.dev/web. But this is just me giving random advice. I tried Dart for a while and it's a nice language, no worse than all the other contenders when it comes to web development.

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Flutter is cool but not ready for the web, much as Google wants to label their web support as "stable"

What's missing?

Slow scrolling, is a major issue. Hard to solve.

Flutter is great for native iOS and Android though.

In my experience: performance. Even Google's Flutter apps lag horribly in Firefox and feel slow and wonky in Chromium.

The development framework is pretty nice with the way you can share code between native and web, but the end result is just lacking.

The performance is terrible.

I looked at the flutter gallery and it looks like they just compile everything to js files and paint the widgets on a canvas element. Would be interesting to know if they're investing any effort in different backends like WASM. Would probably solve their performance problems. Canvas is obviously a sensible option for rendering but it looks like it might be another reason why their performance isn't great.

They are actually pretty active on the WASM GC group because yeah I think that is the exact plan in the future to ship Flutter web apps as WASM rather than JS.

That's good news. Looking forward to the performance improvements.

> If you want to avoid all of that then Flutter/Dart might be a good option: https://dart.dev/web.

I don't get your point, Dart is also compiled to JavaScript.

It reduces the effort of learning different frameworks for the frontend and the backend. You use one language that includes simple interoperatbility between the frontend and the backend. It will still obviously need to be compiled into a format that browsers can work with but if you're gonna use a framework anyway then Dart/Flutter is a reasonable choice (modulo performance issues as mentioned by others in this thread).

But you could make the exact same argument for plain JavaScript? With the difference that JavaScript is way bigger in the web space.

The point is no one uses plain javascript anymore so if you're going to use some domain specific language with its own build pipeline to generate compiled assets for the browser then Dart/Flutter is no worse than any other javascript framework.

It is worse, because very few people use it, and the performance on the frontend is terrible.

My point is the frontend web stack is already very complicated for no good reason so using Flutter/Dart instead of dealing with webpack or whatever the latest build tool is for frontend web projects isn't that big of a difference.

Dart is very easy to learn so whether a lot of people know it or not is not really an issue. Any competent programmer will be able to learn it in a few days.

And my point is that since you're going to learn a JS-like with build tools, you would better be served by JS or TS instead of Dart, since Dart isn't that popular, the frontend experience is terrible and there's not much choice in terms of backend and libraries.

I've tried js, ts, and dart and dart is a much more pleasant language with simpler tooling than the current js/ts web stack. We can continue going back and forth on this but I don't think we're getting anywhere. My suggestion was to someone that was looking to avoid the main hassles of web development and I suggested Flutter/Dart to simplify the toolchain and not worry about having to pick and choose frontend frameworks and build tools because all of that is baked into Flutter/Dart already.

In my brief experience, learning the language and framework only took a few days and it was much easier than making sense of all the issues with the current frontend web stack. Dart also has JavaScript interop so using libraries written in js is not an issue. [1]

1: https://dart.dev/web/js-interop

Yup, everything is a constanatly changing fix on top of broken JS and a broken architecture.

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