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Comment by localfirst | Hacker News Reader

spent some time with flutter/dart and boy oh boy was it tough

you have to spend a lot of time deciding which state management to use theres a lot of packages you have to choose from and it was exhausting

this looks like it could produce smooth 3d experience but i ended up using babylon.js with electron

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threejs/babylon are awesome projects! For me, the main drawback is that they are JS/web frameworks, whereas Thermion (and Flutter/Dart more generally) gives you a cross-platform rendering + UI framework out of the box (and statically-typed, if that's important to you).

I've heard that react-three-fiber lets you build ThreeJS into React Native apps, though? So that may be changing. I'll need to check it out first-hand and see if that's the case.

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on Flutter, I'm a big fan :)

im not so sure that performance hinderance is noticeable since RAM prices have been in free fall

sure I appreciate native compilation, flutter does achieve that tough problem quite well but coming from JS world, its like, man do i have to redo the gymnastics all over again?

so going in my attitude wasn't great I admit but so far babylonjs/electron/REI seems to provide good enough 3D performance even though on older computers it stutters

i think one promising vector is if you can turn JS devs like me into generating flutter projects. that would dramatically lower the barrier.

AFAIR, there are also some 3D graphics libraries for Kotlin Multiplatform.

I have the hardest time figuring out whether I should use Kotlin, Dart/Flutter, or React for building an iOS and Android app. I don't care about the GUI part, but I want easy access to all APIs (like Health Kit, Health Connect, sensors) and relatively stress-free development. When I was learning Flutter a few years ago, it was very frustrating because its documentation and username were scant and scarce. Is it better nowadays?

If your main goal is easy access to platform APIs, then I would probably stick with the native language/UI toolkits. Flutter is a UI framework; if you don’t care about making cross-platform UIs then there’s no real reason to use it. If you’re mostly working with platform APIs, you’ll probably be using the native languages (Kotlin/Swift) anyway (unless someone’s already written a Flutter plugin, which often isn't the case).

I’m still helping out on Stackoverflow, the Flutter issues over though are serious. I feel bad since the issues are mostly stable on either platforms.

I don't want to be turn this into a "Flutter vs other UI frameworks" thread, but I'm curious - what type of problems are you seeing?

To me, state management is a non-issue - there's a built-in option (StatefulWidget/setState), various third party (Riverpod/Provider/etc), and enough basic SDK components (ValueNotifier/StreamBuilder/etc) to roll your own (which is my preference).

It's hard to narrow it down, it's from compilation to pushing the Flutter to its limits. It's overwhelming, I think Flutter might have the highest number of questions on SO. I'm not sure if Google is moving fast enough with Flutter.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/flutter?tab=Newes...

Last I checked, the Flutter GitHub repo had more than 12k issues open, so I definitely agree that there's a lot of questions/issues.

But I take that as an indicator of popularity, not a serious problem with the project. If there were truly fundamental issues, there wouldn't be as many issues raised because noone would be using it :)

I agree with the GH issues. Seems like every popular project gets hugged to death with them. You can either be closing them at light's speed like `kovidgoyal` or you can just roll with it like Flutter, VS Code, or Typescript.

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