Of all the myriad projects from Google, how is Flutter/Dart the one that survived the axe? I’m not saying I hate them - I think they’re both really neat - I just don’t understand why Google keeps these limping along with weak support and no clear vision within their broader web ecosystem.
PyWoody•12m ago
Wasn't AdSense built on Dart?
monocasa•10m ago
Google internally uses dart, and I remember hearing that adwords in particular was rewritten in dart at least for the frontend relatively recently.
So they're probably investing in it enough for basic maintenance, but don't really care about evolving the language.
vmg12•8m ago
Easy, there are a few google teams that use flutter and the cost savings from not having to have dedicated ios and android teams is very easy to point at to justify the project's existence.
I think Dart and Flutter are very overlooked. The language has completely changed since its release, its statically typed, has null safety, enums, and pattern matching, and is very simple and easy to read. It has fast compilation and a ui framework with hot reload. It's as fast as Js on v8 while using less memory and has the overlooked feature of having very fast, almost 0 overhead, ffi.
I think the importance of good ffi is underrated for these ui languages. For reference, everyone that's using electron has to run two node processes doing ipc over a websocket connection. That's going to waste an absurd number of cpu cycles and memory when you are passing messages around when your app is basically a ui for a cli.
gman83•7m ago
I guess because they have buy-in from within Google? Google Pay, NotebookLM, Family Link, Google One, etc. are made with Flutter.
deepsun•6m ago
Most Google's projects that users loved were axed for a reason, typically internal management wars for promotions. Like YouTube really wanted to kill belowed Google Music, so they did. Or Google Pay vs Google Wallet.
Killing Flutter would not promote a manager. For now, of course.
gumby271•5m ago
How are they limping? Flutter has completely replaced it's rendering engine across all platforms and they're building out major window management support on desktop platforms.
At some point there's just not much exciting new stuff to add. Flutter is a nice stable platform, I'd highly recommend it.
Aldo_MX•10m ago
Decoupling material and cupertino makes a lot of sense.
gman83•5m ago
Yes, hopefully now that this decoupling is complete, they'll actually start being updated again. The progress was a bit stalled while this process was ongoing.
jimbob45•18m ago
PyWoody•12m ago
monocasa•10m ago
So they're probably investing in it enough for basic maintenance, but don't really care about evolving the language.
vmg12•8m ago
I think Dart and Flutter are very overlooked. The language has completely changed since its release, its statically typed, has null safety, enums, and pattern matching, and is very simple and easy to read. It has fast compilation and a ui framework with hot reload. It's as fast as Js on v8 while using less memory and has the overlooked feature of having very fast, almost 0 overhead, ffi.
I think the importance of good ffi is underrated for these ui languages. For reference, everyone that's using electron has to run two node processes doing ipc over a websocket connection. That's going to waste an absurd number of cpu cycles and memory when you are passing messages around when your app is basically a ui for a cli.
gman83•7m ago
deepsun•6m ago
Killing Flutter would not promote a manager. For now, of course.
gumby271•5m ago
At some point there's just not much exciting new stuff to add. Flutter is a nice stable platform, I'd highly recommend it.