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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

For me, Flutter is a really good project that I'll never use because I'll always expect Google to suddenly kill it in a year or two.

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It's based on another project that it seemed like Google was going to kill, Dart. I don't think I have good enough priors for this situation but I certainly understand your concern.

The only reason why Dart didn't die was Ad Words team, they had just migrated from GWT into AngularDart when the whole thing imploded, so they rescued the Dart project as it was easier than yet another rewrite into something else.

Been playing around with Flutter the last few months. Still has some rough edges, but the ability to target every major platform with a single code base is very cool. The way the UI is laid out with the widget tree is new to me but fun to learn and seems like a very scalable way to build a UI.

The tree to me feels a lot like React's model, but without the advantage of JSX to compactify the syntax.

React, Vue, and Svelte are the ones most attached to angle brackets for building apps now. I like HTML Custom Elements and surprisingly the slot mechanism often isn't the best way to do things. You can just use functions that call createElement a lot of the time or a library like Snabbdom. Templates are more for static content.

VsCode, Atom, and CodeMirror all do a lot with the web platform without a high angle bracket to line of code ratio.

Web app staples like Floating UI and split-grid don't suffer from a lack of angle brackets.

It's not the specific angle-bracket syntax that matters, but that there's a ton of verbosity around widgets creation, children arrays, and other properties that could have been massively reduced with the right transformations or even just some decorator-style syntax.

Does the flutter vscode plugin still insert fake comments telling you what widget this random parentheses in a sea of other parentheses is the end of?

I’m frankly surprised Dart made a come back at all. I remember hearing a good bit about it and it’s lofty ambitions years ago, but then it seems like it kinda just fell off until Flutter.

In my opinion it was a huge mistake for them to use dart for flutter. I suspect that there would be a lot more excitement around flutter if it used javascript or kotlin (since a lot of android developers are already using kotlin).

(They gave some explanation of why they picked dart at the time but it wasn't at all convincing.)

The original goal was for Dart to replace JS in Chrome.

The original goal was for Dart to be generally adopted by browsers, more specifically, not for it to be Chrome-specific.

If true, by what stretch of the imagination did Google think browser vendors would adopt Dart?

Arrogance is no stretch for Google.

By the same strech that they pushed PNaCL that others refused to adopt.

Which is ironic, given the fizzling market share from Firefox, and how with exception of Safari, all other browsers are based on Chrome.

So there is a certain irony that WASM is anyway driven by Google interests.

> they pushed PNaCL that others refused to adopt.

Well, they all did eventually adopt WebAssembly, so this effort did get somewhere, eventually.

A pyrrhic victory for Mozilla.

AdWords kept it alive until it got chosen by Flutter.

Flutter is a really good start, it's the closest thing I've found to what I'm looking for. I don't even think Google's going to kill it anytime soon.

I don't like Dart though, it has an over-reliance on codegen, and I far prefer JSX's XML syntax than the constructor syntax Flutter uses for its layouts.

I don't think that's very likely. Google is clearly still investigating heavily in Flutter, they use it for some of their own apps and devices, and they are clearly aware that the native Android API is not very good.

The only thing that would make me suspect that they would kill it is the ongoing performance issues due to shader compilation. But they have actually started fixing that properly by creating a new renderer that doesn't do on-demand shader compilation.

The developer tools that Google has released generally don't get suddenly killed. They mostly kill user facing apps that aren't very popular. And Reader.

caniuseflutterwithoutdartyet.com

Forcing me to use Dart because you made the poor decision of developing it, and now need a reason to continue funding it if I want to use Flutter? No thanks.

Google has already all but abandoned Flutter for their own apps and said they were going to focus on using the native iOS toolkit.

https://9to5google.com/2021/10/10/google-ios-apps-native/

This link says absolutely nothing about Flutter usage.

It's about apps that are already written in native iOS code, which are currently using custom Material Design components (which are mostly/entirely in obj-c), and that going forward those custom Material components are going to be phased out and apps will use standard UIKit elements instead.

This tells you absolutely nothing about Google's commitment to flutter.

So it says nothing about using Flutter even though the entire purpose of Flutter is to write cross platform apps and Google is moving toward not writing cross platform apps and are using standard UIKit components.

They also aren’t using Dart and are using Objective C.

But that doesn’t mean they are moving away from Flutter for first party apps?

They aren't moving away because these Google apps weren't using Flutter in the first place. The only ones that were are like, Google Pay and Google Classroom.

https://flutter.dev/showcase/google-pay

https://flutter.dev/showcase/google-classroom

Is that really the argument you want to make? That Google doesn’t even dog food their own products for their most popular apps?

I'm not making any arguments, just stating facts.

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