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What is everyone's take on the future of Flutter for Desktop? It's exciting to think that it could be a viable alternative to Electron or Qt but the fact that t

What is everyone's take on the future of Flutter for Desktop? It's exciting to think that it could be a viable alternative to Electron or Qt but the fact that this is enabled entirely by third-party projects concerns me. Is Flutter for Desktop something that has a future? Will apps built with these tools be maintainable a year from now? At what point would you say it's safe to invest time building and deploying projects built with it?

andrewgiang 8y ago
Google is already experimenting with using flutter for desktop https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop-embedding https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop-embedding
- pjmlp 8y ago
  They also took care to stress multiple times last year, even during Q&A, that only iOS and Android are their main focus.
- sickcodebruh 8y ago
  Experimenting is the key word there. From the caveats section of their readme: "This is not an officially supported Google product." It's promising if they decide to officially support but it's dubious until then.
beavis2 8y ago
I've tried them all. - I don't want to return to C++ - I dislike javascript for large projects because even the best tooling is lacking, and the exploding dependency count. - I love C#, but WPF renders worse than Electron (and Windows only). - WinForms - mothballed. - VB6/Delphi are EOL. - UWP - Very lacking, will probably be abandoned. - Java - I have no experience. It will be a case of Flutter sucking less than the current options. Dart is actually a nice language, especially considering the runtime size - there's no framework overhead/bloat. I imagine it to be Electron, but with a decent set of widgets and without the overhead. Edit - to answer the main question: Personally, I wouldn't develop anything more than a throw-away or personal project right now, but it's worth keeping an eye on it. It would be nice to have a cross-device framework.

andrewgiang 8y ago

Google is already experimenting with using flutter for desktop https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop-embedding https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop-embedding

pjmlp 8y ago
They also took care to stress multiple times last year, even during Q&A, that only iOS and Android are their main focus.
sickcodebruh 8y ago
Experimenting is the key word there. From the caveats section of their readme: "This is not an officially supported Google product." It's promising if they decide to officially support but it's dubious until then.

beavis2 8y ago

I've tried them all. - I don't want to return to C++ - I dislike javascript for large projects because even the best tooling is lacking, and the exploding dependency count. - I love C#, but WPF renders worse than Electron (and Windows only). - WinForms - mothballed. - VB6/Delphi are EOL. - UWP - Very lacking, will probably be abandoned. - Java - I have no experience. It will be a case of Flutter sucking less than the current options. Dart is actually a nice language, especially considering the runtime size - there's no framework overhead/bloat. I imagine it to be Electron, but with a decent set of widgets and without the overhead. Edit - to answer the main question: Personally, I wouldn't develop anything more than a throw-away or personal project right now, but it's worth keeping an eye on it. It would be nice to have a cross-device framework.