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synergy20

I struggled between Flutter and Electronjs, checked at Tauri too.

Electronjs does the 3 Desktops (linux,windows,macos).

Tuari is new, serves the same user base, smaller, but you need learn Rust.

Flutter does 3 Desktops and 2 Mobile platforms(android,ios), but you need learn Dart.

While doing my own research, I eventually chose Flutter, reasons are:

    * it does 5 platforms fairly well
    * its user base keeps rising rapidly over recent years
    * dart is very much java|c++|javascript syntax alike, just simpler, picking up dart at least is much easier for me comparing to Rust.

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Flutter is unsuitable for anything that runs on battery and needs text input.

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/59327

It's insane that this bug is still unfixed.

There is also a brand new one called Socket which is similar to Tauri but doesn’t require knowing any Rust. It does all 5 platforms and it’s just pure HTML, CSS, and JS. It’s announcing a stable release on the 15th.

https://github.com/socketsupply/socket

You should probably disclose that you're the primary developer.

The name seems like a terrible idea, as it's so generic and unsearchable. It will be hard to find help with things, even if it becomes more widely used. The peer-to-peer stuff seems interesting, but the documentation is incomplete. Elsewhere the documentation says "It’s built from scratch, 1000 lines of code", but it's way more than 1000 lines (and it would have to be).

Electron, Node, and Bun are also pretty generic and unsearchable. As to the rest of your comment, the p2p component is less than 1000 lines of code. And, as I said it hasn't had an official release yet (due on the 15th).

But socket already has a well-established meaning in software. I think even if you succeed with that name, it will be at the unnecessary cost of making network programming more difficult for everyone. It's easy to choose a unique name (even "SocketEngine" might do), and now is the time to do it.

Oh, that component is <1000 lines, got it.

Whether or not it's officially released, you are already promoting it as an alternative to much more established options, so you should expect people to compare on the same terms.

make sense to me, node/bun/electron are common words but not so common in software, socket is a well known software term.

I still have no idea how the "socket" magic works, need to be convinced, till then I will stay with flutter for now.

We've set expectations very clearly in that it's pre-release status with the intent to compete with Electron and similar projects. Node is an extremely common word in software for example, but it's not a problem because people generally apply context to their searches.

I don't see the problem with using Flutter. It has proper support from Google for all the major OSes for both Desktop and Mobile. A worthy and serious alternative to both Electron and React Native. It sits in the middle of being faster and smaller than Electron, and being more easier to pick up than Rust with Tauri.

I would rather build a desktop and mobile app using Dart with Flutter than with Rust using Tauri, especially with in a defined deadline or a rewrite.

I see one huge problem with Flutter. It's supported by Google. And uses Dart, which is also supported by Google. And sees very little use outside it.

Agreed; Dart seems like a dead end, let alone compared to Rust or Go.

golang is also by google the same as dart though

Yes, but unlike Dart, Go has at least modest mainstream adoption.

I had the same thought until one day I tried to use it to do some quick Dart coding, turns out it is very easy comparing to other languages, and it has sound null safety too, all syntax are pretty much the same as C, I like it and I hope its popularity will increase.

Being a nice language, is secondary to working.

I thought Dart was close enough to Typescript to be fairly familiar (and thus less risky than a more novel language)?

The lack of native scrolling really kills it for me.

Something just feels "off" when using a flutter app.

Are there any popular Flutter apps in the wild?

The most popular one I have seen is Indian Google Pay (which is different from global Google pay afaik) and that app has terrible performance even on a high end device like Pixel.

Coin by Zerodha (India's biggest stock broker) is also on Flutter but again, has sluggish scrolling.

Curious if this is true for other Flutter apps in the wild or just my experience.

https://flutter.dev/ does have an impressive list of apps, though I'm unaware any existing long-standing popular apps are rewritten in Flutter, it's more about 'if you want to write a cross platform apps today, which framework you will pick'

May I add https://flet.dev Uses python & flutter. And https://wails.io Uses Go.

Is there any good comparison wrt to Wails and Tauri? Or is the only difference between the two is that the backend is different?

They both use the OS' WebView to render the frontend. I only used Wails (I already knew Go) and used it to build simple desktop apps.

wails2 has room to improve and I think it will be done in wails3, also it does not have mobile support yet, both Tauri and Wails might add mobile support in the future, using webview underneath.

just played with flet, don't know why it mentions flutter in its home page as I saw nowhere flutter|dart is involved.

a helloworld python single binary is 28MB with pyinstaller, c libraries are shared and it is not a static executable.

it uses gstreamer underneath? not sure what that means, do I need gstreamer preinstalled on the platforms?

this seems like yet another Python based GUI framework to me(e.g. a new Tkinter), or I'm missing something fundamental.

The UI is built with Flutter but you don't write any Dart. They ship flutter wheel in python and they plan to support other languages like "Go, C# and others are coming next"[0]

[0] https://flet.dev/roadmap

so this is basically a flutter that does not use Dart? this is something major then.

Let’s hope the regulators recent attention to Browser engine restrictions will allow Node.js and Electron to run on IOS and Android.

Would be fantastic especially for smaller software development companies that cannot afford to fund 3 dev teams.

I'm not aware of any browser engine restrictions on Android / Google Play. If Electron isn't running on Android, it's probably because the Electron project has chosen not to do it.

But since there are restrictions on iOS, maybe it's less appealing to bother with Android? (You'd want to be able to say you support both mobile platforms, but you wouldn't be able to. And there wouldn't be a path toward doing that that's within your control.)

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