Comment by DrDroop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DrDroop | Hacker News Reader

Experience report: Impossible to write any serious complex application in this. Lacks components for basic things everyone gets for free on other platforms, things like video, maps or rich text components. Nor does if offer any clear easy path to add them yourself. Breaking API changes every few months. No way to theme something. Immediate mode graphics are great until you need to start managing some complex state, then you are forced to implement your own retainer mode graphics. Again it reintroduces problems that have been solved a long time ago. Very fancy renderer based on piet-gpu that only takes control points of a bezier curve as input and tessellates everything from that. Cool concept, but try drawing a real circle with that, and some some approximation with 4 bezier curves. Wasm is not more then a proof of concept that won't be production ready without years of engineering by compile team. Overall nice for Go developers that wanna do some simple UI with lists and input fields.

You can write anything with it.

V0.6 made your issues much less tricky.

Also there is a Material Design theme. And also light and dark.

Here is an excellent example of a gioui app that has light / dark with a custom theme.

https://github.com/chapar-rest/chapar

If you’re on MAC or Windows it’s just “ go run .”.

If you wanted text keening or text sweeping around an arc or RTL / LRT it can do it thanks to github.com/go-text/typesetting

Complex widgets for Calendar spinners or diagrams are out there on GitHub. An effort to bring these together is lacking, and I reckon that if all these things weee brought together it would definitely encourage more developers to dive in.

> Breaking API changes every few months.

I find this to be the case with a depressing amount of Google code. They do not seem to have a culture which values not breaking their users' code.

Gio isn't made by Google

>Go was invented at Google by Rob Pike, Ken Thomson, and Robert Griesemer.

My bad, you said Gio.

It's even a core point for Carbon, their hopeful C++ replacement

Under language goals on their readme,

> We also have explicit non-goals for Carbon, notably including:

> * A stable application binary interface (ABI) for the entire language and library

> * Perfect backwards or forwards compatibility

There's also this blurb

> Our goals are focused on migration from one version of Carbon to the next rather than compatibility between them. This is rooted in our experience with evolving software over time more generally and a live-at-head model. Any transition, whether based on backward compatibility or a migration plan, will require some manual intervention despite our best efforts, due to Hyrum's Law, and so we should acknowledge that upgrades require active migrations.

https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/do...

This isn’t true in Flutter. They literally bake into the CLI with each release which will automatically identify and upgrade any parts in your application using old APIs without any intervention required. It’s literally the opposite of what you’re describing here.

https://docs.flutter.dev/tools/flutter-fix

What you described is Google breaking your code constantly but also giving you a tool to automatically fix the code they broke, so it fits well within the general philosophy of not taking breaking changes seriously.

It sounds like the tool might make the specific case of flutter version upgrades easier though, if the tool works well, so that's nice. Most Google software doesn't come with similar tools.

There is nothing about that that allows you to come to a good faith conclusion of “doesn’t take breaking changes seriously” when they literally do all of the work for you.

You're right. I should've said they have no qualms about introducing breaking changes.

If you care about WASM, Uno Platform has decent support for it, there’s also AvaloniaUI and both are stable at this point with relatively rich control collections and libraries.

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