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It’s very clever. Except for Dart. It has an image problem among developpers. I don’t know why but everyone I know seems to hate Dart (the only things worse tha

by tangue 9y ago

It’s very clever. Except for Dart. It has an image problem among developpers. I don’t know why but everyone I know seems to hate Dart (the only things worse than coding in Dart for my friends would be something like « writing amp pages in php using Atom »), so unless they can change that or support something like Typescript I’m not sure they’ll attract a lot of developpers.

jrs95 9y ago
I'd never use Dart otherwise, but just to get a decent cross platform development toolkit I'd do it in a heartbeat.
- markdog12 9y ago
  > I'd never use Dart otherwise Why not? I write Dart as part of my day job and it's a very nice language. It always does what you expect, gets out of your way. All my mistakes are my own bone-headed mistakes, not due to the language. That's a great trait in a language.
  - jrs95 9y ago
    Well, for one, I prefer React to Angular, so just in terms of how I'd prefer to write my applications JS seems like a better fit. In general I tend to try and stick to things with large and successful communities when I don't have a particularly compelling reason to do otherwise. However, if I were building a mobile app in Flutter, I probably would stick to Dart for any web client stuff that went along with it, just for consistency and possibly code sharing.
coldtea 9y ago
>I don’t know why but everyone I know seems to hate Dart How many devs you know, that also know Dart? Even more so, that they actually have some opinion, not just a knee jerk reaction? Sounds like a huge sampling bias. >the only things worse than coding in Dart for my friends would be something like "writing amp pages in php using Atom" As if they've tried Dart AND found it that bad -- both of those are highly unprovable, and put together the unprobableness compounds. Besides, millions of devs write in PHP and/or use Atom, so if Dart is as unappealing it would do more than alright. TL;DR; hyperbole.
- tangue 9y ago
  No it's unprovable and completely unscientific, but reactions on this topic seems to prove that it's a widely shared opinion and a fact to consider if Google wants Flutter to succeed.
  - filiph 9y ago
    Disclaimer: I work in the Flutter team, and by extension on the Dart team at Google. We all see the knee jerk reactions to Dart. Yet, most people who _actually_ try it tend to like it a lot. We've run actual studies and something like 98% of developers who haven't tried Dart have no strong opinion about it either way. (Which is not better nor worse than Java or TypeScript, which we benchmarked against.) We also run UX studies on Flutter API and tooling, and Dart is not an issue. Dart is not an easy sell: it doesn't have a gimmick feature, it's just a well-balanced modern language. It was very fashionable to hate it a few years ago. But don't let the vocal minority distort your perception.
    - tangue 9y ago
      Dart is indeed a cool language but there was a huge resentment when the Dart VM was about to be shipped with Chrome and create a Google only web. It's a great burden for the language, I hope it could succeed without being put under our throats.
      - coldtea 9y ago
        Actually I would have been very glad if other vendors adopted the Dart VM, and we got a new fucking web language to eventually replace (or supplement) JS, instead of the pile of hacks we got.
        stefano 9y ago
        We got WASM instead, which I'd argue is much better than support for a specific language, which would lock you in and prevent you from taking advantage of new programming language research.
wwwigham 9y ago
The most attractive thing about flutter (compared to some other crossplat mobile UI frameworks) is the efficient underlying UI framework, so I'm sure if it starts to fail because of Dart they'll be able to eject that coupling and pivot fairly quickly and become more like the competition. However if it succeeds in spite of it's reliance on Dart, then they'll have maybe untarnished its perception a bit.
- tangue 9y ago
  I hope so. Flutter is intriguing and is clearly in its own league as a toolkit.
- filiph 9y ago
  Dart is a major reason that the efficient underlying UI framework works so well: https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf
  - wwwigham 9y ago
    No, the efficacy of the direct GL canvas native bindings and the view composition architecture are why it's efficient. Yes, there's little runtime language overhead because it's AOT compiled, but that alone wouldn't cause it to win over another AOT compiled mobile device strategy, such as an AOT xamarin project. (And all the other points in that article apply equally to xamarin, for example; and some are just opinion like the xml vs code for layout debate) I'm sorry, but I don't see how any of flutter's real performance wins are truly tied to its' choice of language, and it's a competitive market. I'll be happy if I'm proven wrong in a year or two's time, however.
    - Hixie 9y ago
      (Flutter TL here, I wrote large parts of the Flutter framework.) Dart really is a big part of why the Flutter framework is as it is. Obviously you could design similar frameworks in other languages and have similar results, but there's really a very nice synergy between Dart's design and the Flutter framework, all the way down to small details like how garbage collection works in Dart vs how the framework happens to allocate objects. In profiles we see about half the time spent in Dart and half spent in the underlying graphics bindings (it varies wildly per scene, obviously, but as a first approximation this is roughly true). If Dart had been less efficient, then we'd quickly see it in the profiles as a problem. I doubt other languages could have achieved similar results without sacrificing usabilty (e.g. we could get faster performance using C++, probably, but good luck writing a usable reactive framework with manual memory management).
sydd 9y ago
Why do people hate Dart? It looks like a nice language, has a well thought-out design. (I just looked at tutorials, havent written Dart code)
- tangue 9y ago
  A while ago Google did try to ship Dart VM into Chrome (think AMP but for programming language). The language is indeed nice, it's a branding and communication issue, as it's often the case with Google.
  - gsnedders 9y ago
    Well, sorta. The Dart team tried to make it happen, and got a lot of pushback from the Chrome team. I don't think you can claim that Google tried to get it into Chrome.
- willtim 9y ago
  Perhaps because it's just another boring Java-clone language controlled by a large corporation, with no redeeming features?

by tangue 9y ago

jrs95 9y ago

I'd never use Dart otherwise, but just to get a decent cross platform development toolkit I'd do it in a heartbeat.

markdog12 9y ago
> I'd never use Dart otherwise Why not? I write Dart as part of my day job and it's a very nice language. It always does what you expect, gets out of your way. All my mistakes are my own bone-headed mistakes, not due to the language. That's a great trait in a language.
- jrs95 9y ago
  Well, for one, I prefer React to Angular, so just in terms of how I'd prefer to write my applications JS seems like a better fit. In general I tend to try and stick to things with large and successful communities when I don't have a particularly compelling reason to do otherwise. However, if I were building a mobile app in Flutter, I probably would stick to Dart for any web client stuff that went along with it, just for consistency and possibly code sharing.

coldtea 9y ago

>I don’t know why but everyone I know seems to hate Dart How many devs you know, that also know Dart? Even more so, that they actually have some opinion, not just a knee jerk reaction? Sounds like a huge sampling bias. >the only things worse than coding in Dart for my friends would be something like "writing amp pages in php using Atom" As if they've tried Dart AND found it that bad -- both of those are highly unprovable, and put together the unprobableness compounds. Besides, millions of devs write in PHP and/or use Atom, so if Dart is as unappealing it would do more than alright. TL;DR; hyperbole.

tangue 9y ago
No it's unprovable and completely unscientific, but reactions on this topic seems to prove that it's a widely shared opinion and a fact to consider if Google wants Flutter to succeed.
- filiph 9y ago
  Disclaimer: I work in the Flutter team, and by extension on the Dart team at Google. We all see the knee jerk reactions to Dart. Yet, most people who _actually_ try it tend to like it a lot. We've run actual studies and something like 98% of developers who haven't tried Dart have no strong opinion about it either way. (Which is not better nor worse than Java or TypeScript, which we benchmarked against.) We also run UX studies on Flutter API and tooling, and Dart is not an issue. Dart is not an easy sell: it doesn't have a gimmick feature, it's just a well-balanced modern language. It was very fashionable to hate it a few years ago. But don't let the vocal minority distort your perception.
  - tangue 9y ago
    Dart is indeed a cool language but there was a huge resentment when the Dart VM was about to be shipped with Chrome and create a Google only web. It's a great burden for the language, I hope it could succeed without being put under our throats.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      Actually I would have been very glad if other vendors adopted the Dart VM, and we got a new fucking web language to eventually replace (or supplement) JS, instead of the pile of hacks we got.
      - stefano 9y ago
        We got WASM instead, which I'd argue is much better than support for a specific language, which would lock you in and prevent you from taking advantage of new programming language research.

wwwigham 9y ago

The most attractive thing about flutter (compared to some other crossplat mobile UI frameworks) is the efficient underlying UI framework, so I'm sure if it starts to fail because of Dart they'll be able to eject that coupling and pivot fairly quickly and become more like the competition. However if it succeeds in spite of it's reliance on Dart, then they'll have maybe untarnished its perception a bit.

tangue 9y ago
I hope so. Flutter is intriguing and is clearly in its own league as a toolkit.
filiph 9y ago
Dart is a major reason that the efficient underlying UI framework works so well: https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf
- wwwigham 9y ago
  No, the efficacy of the direct GL canvas native bindings and the view composition architecture are why it's efficient. Yes, there's little runtime language overhead because it's AOT compiled, but that alone wouldn't cause it to win over another AOT compiled mobile device strategy, such as an AOT xamarin project. (And all the other points in that article apply equally to xamarin, for example; and some are just opinion like the xml vs code for layout debate) I'm sorry, but I don't see how any of flutter's real performance wins are truly tied to its' choice of language, and it's a competitive market. I'll be happy if I'm proven wrong in a year or two's time, however.
  - Hixie 9y ago
    (Flutter TL here, I wrote large parts of the Flutter framework.) Dart really is a big part of why the Flutter framework is as it is. Obviously you could design similar frameworks in other languages and have similar results, but there's really a very nice synergy between Dart's design and the Flutter framework, all the way down to small details like how garbage collection works in Dart vs how the framework happens to allocate objects. In profiles we see about half the time spent in Dart and half spent in the underlying graphics bindings (it varies wildly per scene, obviously, but as a first approximation this is roughly true). If Dart had been less efficient, then we'd quickly see it in the profiles as a problem. I doubt other languages could have achieved similar results without sacrificing usabilty (e.g. we could get faster performance using C++, probably, but good luck writing a usable reactive framework with manual memory management).

sydd 9y ago

Why do people hate Dart? It looks like a nice language, has a well thought-out design. (I just looked at tutorials, havent written Dart code)

tangue 9y ago
A while ago Google did try to ship Dart VM into Chrome (think AMP but for programming language). The language is indeed nice, it's a branding and communication issue, as it's often the case with Google.
- gsnedders 9y ago
  Well, sorta. The Dart team tried to make it happen, and got a lot of pushback from the Chrome team. I don't think you can claim that Google tried to get it into Chrome.
willtim 9y ago
Perhaps because it's just another boring Java-clone language controlled by a large corporation, with no redeeming features?