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Comment by slig | Hacker News Reader

Is there any Flutter-like alternative but using TypeScript? Dart feels too weird.

Give Dart a chance :) Felt the same way, turns out it's quite fun.

I'll give it a chance when it has algebraic data types and pattern matching. The fact that they post these as examples of language features they don't want means I don't want to touch it with a ten-foot pole. I look at Option, Either, and functor in dartz and I can see that the ergonomics are so bad and noisy to read. Semicolons required in a modern language is the cherry atop this ‘nope’ dessert.

Dart is like Java, Kotlin or Swift with the runtime model of JavaScript, there is nothing weird about it. It takes an hour to learn it if you know either of these.

Dart reaches nowhere near kotlin. Kotlin is a beautiful language.

They are basically the same language, but Kotlin tries to sit on different runtime models with Kotlin/JVM, Kotlin/JS and Kotlin/Native. Dart behaves the same everywhere.

Saying they are the same language is proof of gigantic ignorance both ergonomics wise and feature wise. Secondly Kotlin multiplatform behave the same, we are using it to share backend and frontend business logic (Kotlin js).

Yes, the reason Dart exists and continues to exist is not that it is better than Kotlin but because Kotlin is not owned by Google and they just have a giant not invented here syndrome. It's all about control for them. It's basically their way or the highway.

But Google seems to be betting on multiple horses here. They also created Jetpack Compose. And of course Jetbrains extended that to Compose Desktop and Compose Web so that ecosystem is actually becoming quite interesting together with their multi platform Kotlin compilers. Compose Desktop does not currently use the Kotlin native compiler unfortunately but it does use Skia, which is the same graphics library that Google uses for Chrome and Flutter. If they'd fix the desktop variant to use the native compiler, they'd be able to target basically any platform. Including IOS.

IMHO that is such an obvious thing to do for Jetbrains that I pretty much assume that they are planning to go there. That would make this a direct competitor to Flutter.

Compose is getting quite popular despite still being relatively new. IMHO, if Jetbrains (or Google) get their act together and make that usable for IOS, there would be a lot of developers that would use that. I know I would. Flutter is not for me. I'm sure it's great but I have no desire to learn Dart.

We are currently using Kotlin js to be able to target mobile and web and kotlin jvm on our servers. We package up our app using Cordova and we have integrated a few plugins to e.g. do things with NFC. It works great. Performance is not an issue for us. And having just one code base and 1 UI team is critical for us. But I wouldn't mind some more options for cross platform development. Browsers are a necessary evil currently to target mobile and desktop with 1 application. But the boundaries between these platforms are increasingly artificial.

Capacitor for sure. Check the top comment, it depends on your needs.

https://capacitorjs.com/

The language fades into background in my experience. There are some gotchas (like overuse of Dynamic) but on the whole, tooling works really well, and can get stuff done.

I still can't believe Google wanted Dart to replace JavaScript, and still you can't express an object's interface in it.

https://github.com/dart-lang/language/issues/783

The thread has several alternatives. What problems are not solvable with dart’s class approach?

Why is Dart weird for you? I've seen people getting to know Dart from various backgrounds (be it from Java, JavaScript, C# or Python), and so far everybody got productive in a short amount of time.

You can learn new language in short time but standard library and tools not that fast - especially if they dont exist. You will have to google e.g. how to parse Date etc. People enjoy big ecosystem of libraries and tools.

Just to give you example In many ways I prefer Ruby than Python as a language but Python is just swiss army knife and in many cases you are one PIP install away to finding library that solves your problem. Maybe Python doesn't have such a nice web framework as Ruby on Rails but ruby is not much used elsewhere.

I think people complaining about Dart as a chosen language not because of it's features but because

1) you have to learn and/or redevelop new SDK for it,

2) language doesn't have good interrop with any other languages (like Kotlin -> Java, Swift -> Objective-C, TypeScript -> JavaScript, Objective-C -> C++, Rust -> C, C++ -> C)

3) ecosystem is small

React Native

Ionic

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