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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

We have a react native app and sometimes it fails to build. We go to lunch, and come back no code change now it builds.

I'm just sick of the NPM/Javascript bullshit.

Does Flutter avoid all of these kinds of issues? I'm this close to scrapping the whole thing.

I worked with React Native for 3 years before jumping over to Flutter and this was the biggest reason why I made the switch. Its exponentially better on Flutter. The only time builds break for the team are when we made a code change that broke it. Its consistent and non-flaky (looking at you RN). Not that you won't run into the occasional issue but with React Native easily 20% of my time developing was "this just stopped working and there's no reason why". React Native was configuration hell. With Flutter, I haven't struggled with that at all past the initial setup.

This has been my experience with RN too (admittedly, a few years back). So much time wasted on troubleshooting random glitches that occur for seemingly unrelated reason. Some minor library version update? Boom, your breakpoints no longer work. Why? Noone knows. The "turn it off, turn it on" approach seems to be the go-to fix in this environment. And there's always another surprise around the corner. I can't really contrast it with Flutter, because I only toyed with it a little bit, but at least the docs were of much better quality - and this being a few years back as I said, the fact that Flutter was the newer framework (and still provided better quality at least in this area) was even more pronounced.

I never coded React Native, but I have a lot of experience with Flutter. You can definitely run into build issues, but it's almost exclusively when doing precarious things like upgrading third party packages, SDKs or Flutter versions. As soon as you've traversed the depths of dependency hell and it builds, it builds without a hitch repeatedly in my experience.

As the framework is maturing there have been some major transitions between APIs and project structure. My main app that was scaffolded two years ago has had no shortage of duct tape fixes and tweaks to especially Gradle/Cocoapods config to keep it building.

I guess it's a fair price for what has otherwise been a fantastic developer experience. All in all I'd strongly recommend it.

As someone with a lot of Flutter experience, I can second this. It usually works pretty reliably until someday you upgrade and cocoapods keeps complaining even when you clean everything and rebuild.

There is no framework that never has issues.

Flutter has its fair share (and to be fair, so do the native toolchains).

For mobile apps (not web), I think yes - Flutter solves a lot of these kinds of issues. As with any project, don't just blindly add a lot of dependencies as they may vary in quality and stability, but overall you deal with two things; Dart and Flutter, and it's quite refreshing.

Not as good as native, but if you're going to go cross platform due to various reasons such as development costs, then it's the way to go.

> I'm just sick of the NPM/Javascript bullshit.

Amen

Flutter is miles ahead of React Native at least in this regard

No, use native if you want to avoid that

Dude I'm close trust me.

It's easier. Start with iOS.

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