4 ms·

The... "rise" of Flutter? According to which metric? Flutter is nonexistent outside Google employees and a handful of Flutter advocates who write books or blog

The... "rise" of Flutter? According to which metric? Flutter is nonexistent outside Google employees and a handful of Flutter advocates who write books or blog posts about it. The performance and tool chain penalty of flutter makes absolutely zero sense today, when so many better alternatives exist.

timsneath 8y ago
Disclosure: I'm one of those Google employees. I think it's a bit of a stretch to say it's non-existent outside of Google; curious to know what made you feel so negatively about it. Flutter is one of the top 30 most starred repos on Github (top 20 if you exclude non-software content); given that it wasn't even in the top 100 six months ago, I think most would agree it's growing pretty quickly. And even though it's only been out of beta for three weeks, it's used by large companies from Alibaba to Square to Capital One. Examples like this [1] show that it's fully capable of delivering game-quality experiences even on older devices, since it compiles directly to ARM code and uses the Skia graphics engine. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.two_dimensions.showcaseapp&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.two_dimens...
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > it's fully capable of delivering game-quality experiences I find it interesting you mention this, rather than something like “well designed”. Seems appropriate for a framework that draws UI itself, much like a game would.
- damian2000 8y ago
  I went to a Google Flutter meetup a few weeks ago and was impressed by it ... key advantage in my view is that its skinnable and builds its UI from scratch - a lot of apps will be ok with that and in fact its a bonus if they look exactly the same on both major platforms.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > Flutter is one of the top 30 most starred repos on Github (top 20 if you exclude non-software content); given that it wasn't even in the top 100 six months ago, I think most would agree it's growing pretty quickly. Are Github stars a valid metric for use? Personally, I have ~280 repos starred, and all of those stars are bookmarks. "Cute, I might use it one day".
tanilama 8y ago
I can see how it is getting traction. Static-typed java lite language, near-native, cross-platform support. There is a lot to like. And there aren't many alternatives out there, if you consider cross-platform compilation a must. React Native and alikes suffer even greater performance related issues. The only thing currently blocking Flutter, is the ecosystem. But for some presentation centric apps that need functional yet consistent UI, Flutter is pretty competitive solution. What is somewhat a little concerning is, unlike React has JSX to relatively easily to compose components, at least in a fashion that is easy to tell the hierarchy, Flutter seems to opt for deeply nested parentheses, which results in lengthy code and isn't very friendly to the eyes.
- wsc981 8y ago
  There's also Xamarin which should allow for close to native performance, provides a native user experience and allows for a lot of code sharing between iOS and Android. And, it's also proven tech. I also like that Xamarin follows up on new iOS and Android releases really quickly.
geniium 8y ago
Yeah forget Flutter, every dev I spoke with said it’s a joke. They shared similar feelings : only Google is pushing for it.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Chrome and Angular dropping Dart 1.0 was a lesson. I will only bother with Dart 2.x and Flutter if Google actually replaces Android frameworks with it, and makes it unavoidable. For iOS/Android apps, PWAs, Xamarin, Qt, React Native, Unity/Unreal, SDL, SFML, Cocos2d-x, Godot are much more appealing with CV worthy programming languages.
  - nv-vn 8y ago
    >CV worthy programming languages. What do you mean by this? Like languages that are worth putting on your CV because recruiters or did I misunderstand?
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Languages that are worthy to put on the CV, because of customers, employers and recruiters.
MarkMc 8y ago
According to the "Stack Overflow Flutter questions" metric: http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[ionic-framework,react-native,flutter,xamarin]&relative=false http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[ionic-framework,react-native,f... Also according to the "number of Flutter jobs posted on jobstreet.co.uk". Three months ago it was 5 [0] now it's 13. For reference the number of React Native jobs has grown from 43 to 74. Let's see where things stand in another 3 months. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18029570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18029570
mda 8y ago
Here is the stackoverflow trend chart Fwiw. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=flutter%2Creact-native https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=flutter%2Crea... My limited experience with Flutter made a very good first impression.
glenrivard 8y ago
It already has 48k stars on GitHub and just hit V1. I am old and done pretty much every GUI development there has been through the years. From Xwindows, Swing, AWT, Windows, iOS, Android, Qt, etc. Flutter has the best developer UX I have seen. Think it is going to be a big deal.
deforciant 8y ago
It doesn’t seem you know what flutter is:) performance and tool chain is orders of magnitude better than the alternatives. Please try it out. I am a go, python, js dev and I find flutter offering the best developer UX

timsneath 8y ago

Disclosure: I'm one of those Google employees. I think it's a bit of a stretch to say it's non-existent outside of Google; curious to know what made you feel so negatively about it. Flutter is one of the top 30 most starred repos on Github (top 20 if you exclude non-software content); given that it wasn't even in the top 100 six months ago, I think most would agree it's growing pretty quickly. And even though it's only been out of beta for three weeks, it's used by large companies from Alibaba to Square to Capital One. Examples like this [1] show that it's fully capable of delivering game-quality experiences even on older devices, since it compiles directly to ARM code and uses the Skia graphics engine. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.two_dimensions.showcaseapp&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.two_dimens...

saagarjha 8y ago
> it's fully capable of delivering game-quality experiences I find it interesting you mention this, rather than something like “well designed”. Seems appropriate for a framework that draws UI itself, much like a game would.
damian2000 8y ago
I went to a Google Flutter meetup a few weeks ago and was impressed by it ... key advantage in my view is that its skinnable and builds its UI from scratch - a lot of apps will be ok with that and in fact its a bonus if they look exactly the same on both major platforms.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> Flutter is one of the top 30 most starred repos on Github (top 20 if you exclude non-software content); given that it wasn't even in the top 100 six months ago, I think most would agree it's growing pretty quickly. Are Github stars a valid metric for use? Personally, I have ~280 repos starred, and all of those stars are bookmarks. "Cute, I might use it one day".

tanilama 8y ago

I can see how it is getting traction. Static-typed java lite language, near-native, cross-platform support. There is a lot to like. And there aren't many alternatives out there, if you consider cross-platform compilation a must. React Native and alikes suffer even greater performance related issues. The only thing currently blocking Flutter, is the ecosystem. But for some presentation centric apps that need functional yet consistent UI, Flutter is pretty competitive solution. What is somewhat a little concerning is, unlike React has JSX to relatively easily to compose components, at least in a fashion that is easy to tell the hierarchy, Flutter seems to opt for deeply nested parentheses, which results in lengthy code and isn't very friendly to the eyes.

wsc981 8y ago
There's also Xamarin which should allow for close to native performance, provides a native user experience and allows for a lot of code sharing between iOS and Android. And, it's also proven tech. I also like that Xamarin follows up on new iOS and Android releases really quickly.

geniium 8y ago

Yeah forget Flutter, every dev I spoke with said it’s a joke. They shared similar feelings : only Google is pushing for it.

pjmlp 8y ago
Chrome and Angular dropping Dart 1.0 was a lesson. I will only bother with Dart 2.x and Flutter if Google actually replaces Android frameworks with it, and makes it unavoidable. For iOS/Android apps, PWAs, Xamarin, Qt, React Native, Unity/Unreal, SDL, SFML, Cocos2d-x, Godot are much more appealing with CV worthy programming languages.
- nv-vn 8y ago
  >CV worthy programming languages. What do you mean by this? Like languages that are worth putting on your CV because recruiters or did I misunderstand?
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Languages that are worthy to put on the CV, because of customers, employers and recruiters.

MarkMc 8y ago

According to the "Stack Overflow Flutter questions" metric: http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[ionic-framework,react-native,flutter,xamarin]&relative=false http://sotagtrends.com/?tags=[ionic-framework,react-native,f... Also according to the "number of Flutter jobs posted on jobstreet.co.uk". Three months ago it was 5 [0] now it's 13. For reference the number of React Native jobs has grown from 43 to 74. Let's see where things stand in another 3 months. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18029570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18029570

mda 8y ago

Here is the stackoverflow trend chart Fwiw. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=flutter%2Creact-native https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=flutter%2Crea... My limited experience with Flutter made a very good first impression.

glenrivard 8y ago

It already has 48k stars on GitHub and just hit V1. I am old and done pretty much every GUI development there has been through the years. From Xwindows, Swing, AWT, Windows, iOS, Android, Qt, etc. Flutter has the best developer UX I have seen. Think it is going to be a big deal.

deforciant 8y ago

It doesn’t seem you know what flutter is:) performance and tool chain is orders of magnitude better than the alternatives. Please try it out. I am a go, python, js dev and I find flutter offering the best developer UX