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Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

Isn't flutter the anti thesis of that? Making performant JavaScript apps is much much easier than making a performant flutter or especially flutter web app

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I have an opposite experience. Making performant JavaScript app require years of learning hacks of web ecosystem. Which is unsurprising, given that web apps build on the foundation layer not suited for performant UI apps. Flutter apps are performant out of the box, because, well, it was designed with this goal in mind.

No idea if it's any better on Android, but on iOS I can recognize a Flutter app within seconds, by the frame rate on a new iPhone dropping to something I haven't seen on any mobile device (iOS or Android!) since the Android 2.2 days on extremely underpowered Qualcomm chips.

Yep, my typical experience with flutter apps is having way more frame drops, and occasional bugs which lock up the entire UI and require an app restart. Thankfully I think google is moving towards just using the platform UI for most apps, though I can't remember where I read that so take it with a grain of salt.

Most likely they’re not using the new impeller rendering engine. My flutter app is very smooth on iOS and I didn’t have to put in any fancy hacks to make it that way.

Flutter apps have god awful performance when there is even a single platform view on the screen. In effect this means that if the app is monetized by ads, have any video, map embed or anything of the sort, it will have sub-30fps and very janky scroll even on iPhone 15 Pro and it really seems that there is no hacks to save you.

That hasn’t been true for over a year maybe two at this point.

It is absolutely true still, it is especially bad on iOS and the worst when you have a ProMotion device. They did hard lock the max fps to 80fps on scrollable elements on ProMotion devices, which really is telling enough but it doesn't solve the very noticeable jitter either.

I'm writing a game in Flutter. The game has ads, shaders, custom gesture detectors, ... . I can tell you, it is absolutely butter smooth on iOS.

I tried something similar a few years ago and I would have said you're absolutely right. But with the one I'm writing now, it is quite the different experience.

On Android, Flutter apps are typically even faster than native on cheap low-end devices from my experience. I'm comparing using a Galaxy J3 pro and the difference is visible in favor of Flutter. On high-end devices, I don't see any difference.

That's also one of the reason why the framework is so popular in developing countries.

You can use dart without flutter.

Absolutely, but for webapps, is there any other options using dart? For the record, dart is one of my favorite languages. I'm just a bit sad that it is more or less tied to flutter (not by design, just because it's the main usage it gets)

How do you feel about Java? How about Ruby? (If you have worked with those). I'm mainly asking so I have a baseline for what your preferences are. Considered Dart in the past but haven't tried yet

I dislike ruby, purely as a matter of personal preference. As a baseline, python is probably as "dynamic" as I can tolerate, and java I just don't have enough experience with sadly enough. I use mostly c++/go/python with some julia and rust (not enough to have tons of experience with it though!). I'd day try dart, it's very easy to pick up. In some odd ways it reminds me of swift!

thank you!

Jaspr is one such framework, it is written similarly to Flutter but it instead outputs HTML, CSS and JS.

They are a couple of weeks away from launching a major rewrite of Web support.

Historically it was clunky and weird.

Now it’s able to use the exact same Web APIs that you’re already used to but now in a type safe way and much much better type safety guarantees that Typescript provides.

Example code here: https://github.com/dart-lang/web/blob/main/example/example.d...

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