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Comment by doodlesdev | Hacker News Reader

While I've used Flutter since Alpha, I've been away for a few years. A few things have shocked me in these release notes: how come Impeller still wasn't the default engine for all platforms? Also, why are they migrating to WASM if one of the core features of Dart is compiling to JavaScript? Finally, how come multi window support only get viable now, after four years having desktop support?

Honestly, Flutter is an extremely enjoyable development experience I would recommend anyone I care for to stay away from. The fact it's developed by Google doesn't help: it's a matter of time before they kill it like they did with so many UI libraries and frameworks already, specially with JetBrains developing Compose Multiplatform and the Android team going all-in in the Compose strategy.

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Flutter operates more like a 2D game engine. It renders its own views, which involves a lot of arithmetic operations, making WASM a more efficient option than JS.

WASM or JS doesn’t matter. The reason is Canvas instead of DOM. Flutter apps render to the canvas element, because this is the only option for the 2D game engine you mentioned.

> how come Impeller still wasn't the default engine for all platforms

Because Impeller has had quite a bumpy ride. Even as recently as June I reported a bug/regression with basic stuff (lines with partial transparency on desktop). All my Android apps are still built with --no-enable-impeller because I've had many instances where the app just shows a blank screen due to driver conflicts.

It may be getting close to stable now, but it wasn't a smooth transition at all.

I suppose AI would help for porting your app if you need to? It's not like the old days.

Unless it is a trivial app, it would still require quite some effort to port (and test), which has a cost. What do you gain by using Flutter that compensates for that risk?

Working on all devices with minimal effort. That's what I use it for anyway, anything else like a sound null safe language with Dart are just a bonus.

We've been hearing that Flutter is going to be killed any day now for almost a decade. And yet here we are, it's a stable platform that's quietly chugging along with massive 3rd party buy in. Honestly, Google could abandon it at this point and it would have enough momentum to keep going just fine. Where is Compose Multiplatform? Does anyone actually use that, is it even stable yet?

Some do use CMP but yes it's quite immature compared to Flutter and they'll spend a lot of time fixing the same bugs with rendering that Flutter fixed a while ago. We'll see how it goes though, if CMP becomes the blessed route for Android cross platform development it'll attract more people and attention.

The fact is, more and more companies are actually picking Flutter. :) Sony praises Flutter on embedded. LG has added extension to allow Flutter apps on its WebOS. Toyota is developing a Flutter game engine, which is already used in some of its cars.

The real question is, will the world reach it's Paris climate goals before compose releases by 2050, or not.

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