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.
monocasa•49m 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•47m 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.
cageface•35m ago
I’ve had good experiences with Flutter too. It’s actually much easier to build a performant macOS app with flutter than with SwiftUI.
formvoltron•26m ago
Curious how you feel about KMP and Kotlin Compose.
vmg12•20m ago
I like kotlin a lot but I didn't get to fully test KMP and Kotlin Compose. I chose flutter because I liked dart's wasm story better than kotlins.
Larrikin•18m ago
But they also fund JetBrains, Jetpack Compose, and KMP. It feels like the company through their support behind Kotlin a long while ago on mobile, but internal struggles keep the others limping along. Compose UI tooling no longer requires viewing on device.
gman83•46m ago
I guess because they have buy-in from within Google? Google Pay, NotebookLM, Family Link, Google One, etc. are made with Flutter.
deepsun•45m 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•44m 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.
matchbok3•28m ago
Right, but, nobody uses it. So what's the point for Google?
gkhartman•20m ago
Is that true though? I'm reading HN on an app built using Flutter. I had no idea until recently, so I would assume more apps could use it without my knowledge.
I understand it's limitations vs native apps, but there's quite a few cases where it really doesn't matter.
The biggest one for me is always the fear it will be abandoned. Pretty much goes for any cross platform app framework though.
monocasa•8m ago
Google AdSense uses it.
kllrnohj•2m ago
> Flutter has completely replaced it's rendering engine across all platforms
And that new rendering engine is also why apps like Immich are unable to show HDR photos. Apple & Google both pushed broad support for that a couple years ago, with things like Ultra HDR and subsequently ISO 21496-1.
Of course they need to prioritize where to spend resources, like any project, but Flutter also doesn't seem to be on any critical path for fancy headlining new features, either.
Scene_Cast2•14m ago
In one of their dev surveys, they did float the idea of divesting Flutter.
Aldo_MX•50m ago
Decoupling material and cupertino makes a lot of sense.
gman83•44m 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.
kumarvvr•34m ago
The one thing I hate about flutter is the ui code having an ungodly amount of nested brackets.
eddythompson80•31m ago
You clearly need more Lispmaxxing
superze•13m ago
Loc goes brrrrrrr. The tokenmaxxing of the 20s
Scene_Cast2•11m ago
Awesome. I'd love if Flutter could also finally get Impeller on Web (I'm tracking the GitHub issues, seems like there's progress at least).
I personally would like for it to pick up some ideas from Svelte.
jimbob45•57m ago
monocasa•49m ago
So they're probably investing in it enough for basic maintenance, but don't really care about evolving the language.
vmg12•47m 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.
cageface•35m ago
formvoltron•26m ago
vmg12•20m ago
Larrikin•18m ago
gman83•46m ago
deepsun•45m ago
Killing Flutter would not promote a manager. For now, of course.
gumby271•44m 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.
matchbok3•28m ago
gkhartman•20m ago
I understand it's limitations vs native apps, but there's quite a few cases where it really doesn't matter.
The biggest one for me is always the fear it will be abandoned. Pretty much goes for any cross platform app framework though.
monocasa•8m ago
kllrnohj•2m ago
And that new rendering engine is also why apps like Immich are unable to show HDR photos. Apple & Google both pushed broad support for that a couple years ago, with things like Ultra HDR and subsequently ISO 21496-1.
Meanwhile Flutter still doesn't really have wide gamut support https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/189155
Of course they need to prioritize where to spend resources, like any project, but Flutter also doesn't seem to be on any critical path for fancy headlining new features, either.
Scene_Cast2•14m ago