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<fanboy>Looking at Flutter vs React Native, the only comparison of interest for, perhaps most of us, Flutter for the win! Lower dev resources and way lower cpu

<fanboy>Looking at Flutter vs React Native, the only comparison of interest for, perhaps most of us, Flutter for the win! Lower dev resources and way lower cpu usage. Dart is lovely, the docs are great, wide array of great UI widgets, and easy animation. As for hot reloading, well, you just have to experience the difference.</fanboy>

siquick 7y ago
> Lower dev resources Learning a completely new language in Dart to even get started with Flutter doesn't seem like low dev resources. With React Native you are using: - Javascript which most devs have a grasp on in 2020 - JSX which really isn't much different to HTML - Styling is practically just CSS with slightly different property formatting and naming If you've decided to go down the RN then theres a decent chance that your devs have used React before and there really isn't much between React and RN.
- dickjocke 7y ago
  <Also fanboy > Learning Flutter is really easy. I know everyone says it, but I encourage everyone to spend one Saturday trying to build some toy app with a single Google Maps screen or something. I fought with React Native for so long because it's dominant but I don't think I can ever go back. I never found myself getting truly comfortable with it or feeling like it did what I expected. Im a backend dev so I really love that flutter will handle so much of the positioning of widgets/components on the screen AND give me a decent styling out the box and I only have to intervene if I want to. Thinking back to Grids and Flexbox makes my skin crawl lol.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Xamarin and Qt also give me the same, with more useful industry programming languages.
    - distances 7y ago
      Both of which are now practically deaf on mobile. Flutter comes from Google, and while that doesn't guarantee it'll live, at least it has better potential.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        They are only dead on the SV HN bubble kind of thing. Dart also comes from Google and if it wasn't for Ad Words team it would be more dead than anything else. Flutter is it very last opportunity to stay relevant. Given that, I rather bet in dead technology with useful programming languages.
        distances 7y ago
        Hard disagree. Microsoft has practically abandoned Xamarin and is doing React Native themselves these days. Qt tried on mobile but never took off, there's hardly any mobile apps made with it and the few there are feel very out of place. Note that I really like Qt/QML so I wish it fared better -- please let me know if you have some success stories to share. Flutter is the last option for Dart to stay relevant sure. You learn a programming language in a couple of days though so it just doesn't matter, and doesn't change the fact that in mobile world C# and C++ are just as irrelevant. I worked for years with C++, but I don't expect to ever again need it in a professional setting. This is of course just from mobile perspective. Everywhere else Flutter is currently useless, and Qt/C# perhaps a good choice.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Microsoft has officially communicated many times, including at BUILD 2019 and .NET Conf, that React Native is for Web developers, and Xamarin for .NET developers. They aren't one pony trick shop. Qt didn't not take off for free beer mobile devs, it is doing alright for the kind of corporations that actually buy development tools. Again we aren't talking about SV HN kind of bubbles here. And I am betting Flutter won't save Dart, specially with Android team doing JetPack Composer and teaming with JetBrains on Kotlin/Native portability between iOS and Android. Long term, PWAs with WebGL and WebAssembly will take it all.
- bananabreakfast 7y ago
  Learning Dart is definitely not a large dev hurdle. Most people (esp. js devs) can read dart and understand what it is doing without ever having even seen the code before. I've found it takes an experienced engineer about two weeks to learn enough Go to be productive and Dart is honestly easier than that.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - tatersolid 7y ago
    I have 20 C#/JS/SQL developers I want to put in a mobile project. So I’m supposed to eat an employee-year of salary to even consider Flutter+Dart? Not gonna happen, especially with Google’s track record. Already been burned by the Angular v1 -> v2+ nightmare.
- novok 7y ago
  If you are an iOS or Android developer already, learning dart vs the mess that is javascript seems more appealing. I would imagine something similar for non-JS backend developers. Web devs are not the only kind of developer out there.
- dep_b 7y ago
  - A million packages that never really seem to be in sync - A ton of different ways to do the same thing (Expo or not for example) - Documentation is always outdated - You still have to deal with the most annoying part of native apps, namely compilation and certification. If it was a book it would have the title: "Native apps: the shitty parts" - Doing the same thing twice with this package management and build system (or ten times...) can yield a different result - JavaScript is an awful language, TypeScript makes it more tolerable but you can't really escape the problems JavaScript has
- je42 7y ago
  I was part of a team who had to do two upgrades of the react native version. and every time, it was a pain taking weeks of developer productivity away. ... i wonder if React Native fixed this problem... but their track record is not the best...
  - siquick 7y ago
    The 0.6 release brought in autolinking and a better integration with Cocoapods so worth checking out.
- kdot 7y ago
  Any competent dev will be functional in Dart in days. Flutter really is fantastic, I like being in Dart 90% of the time, no XML, no Storyboard. Currently employed on a Flutter project, hopefully jobs aspects improve.
pjmlp 7y ago
Hardly impressed with hot reloading, having done GUIs in Lisp, Smalltalk and Oberon. Plus the competition is stepping up, with Swift UI, Xamarin, Jetpack Compose hot reload support.
- happa 7y ago
  It's one thing to have hot reload and another to have it also preserve the whole app state like Dart/Flutter does.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    You mean like Common Lisp and Smalltalk do.
    - discreteevent 7y ago
      What's impressive is that they brought this experience to cross platform mobile. Reminds me of Guy Steele's quote about Java bringing the mainstream halfway to lisp but people could only complain.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        It is so impressive that now other platforms are adding it, thus proving the point that Dart is not a special snowflake. What Java brought, we already had in the form of Eiffel, Oberon, Modula-3, Smalltalk, Component Pascal, Dylan, they just suffered from not having Sun's budget offering a compiler and training materials for free. Now they are trying to bolt into Java, features that some of those languages already had, but Java 1.0 ditched them like value types, AOT compilation to native code and proper generics. I am betting that Dart will never have any relevant market share besides being the Flutter's language. Android team is betting on Kotlin/Native and Jetpack Composer, so lets see who will win the internal politics.
fulafel 7y ago
I think React Native had hot reloading before. At least the ClojureScript + React Native stuff did.

siquick 7y ago

> Lower dev resources Learning a completely new language in Dart to even get started with Flutter doesn't seem like low dev resources. With React Native you are using: - Javascript which most devs have a grasp on in 2020 - JSX which really isn't much different to HTML - Styling is practically just CSS with slightly different property formatting and naming If you've decided to go down the RN then theres a decent chance that your devs have used React before and there really isn't much between React and RN.

dickjocke 7y ago
<Also fanboy > Learning Flutter is really easy. I know everyone says it, but I encourage everyone to spend one Saturday trying to build some toy app with a single Google Maps screen or something. I fought with React Native for so long because it's dominant but I don't think I can ever go back. I never found myself getting truly comfortable with it or feeling like it did what I expected. Im a backend dev so I really love that flutter will handle so much of the positioning of widgets/components on the screen AND give me a decent styling out the box and I only have to intervene if I want to. Thinking back to Grids and Flexbox makes my skin crawl lol.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Xamarin and Qt also give me the same, with more useful industry programming languages.
  - distances 7y ago
    Both of which are now practically deaf on mobile. Flutter comes from Google, and while that doesn't guarantee it'll live, at least it has better potential.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      They are only dead on the SV HN bubble kind of thing. Dart also comes from Google and if it wasn't for Ad Words team it would be more dead than anything else. Flutter is it very last opportunity to stay relevant. Given that, I rather bet in dead technology with useful programming languages.
      - distances 7y ago
        Hard disagree. Microsoft has practically abandoned Xamarin and is doing React Native themselves these days. Qt tried on mobile but never took off, there's hardly any mobile apps made with it and the few there are feel very out of place. Note that I really like Qt/QML so I wish it fared better -- please let me know if you have some success stories to share. Flutter is the last option for Dart to stay relevant sure. You learn a programming language in a couple of days though so it just doesn't matter, and doesn't change the fact that in mobile world C# and C++ are just as irrelevant. I worked for years with C++, but I don't expect to ever again need it in a professional setting. This is of course just from mobile perspective. Everywhere else Flutter is currently useless, and Qt/C# perhaps a good choice.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Microsoft has officially communicated many times, including at BUILD 2019 and .NET Conf, that React Native is for Web developers, and Xamarin for .NET developers. They aren't one pony trick shop. Qt didn't not take off for free beer mobile devs, it is doing alright for the kind of corporations that actually buy development tools. Again we aren't talking about SV HN kind of bubbles here. And I am betting Flutter won't save Dart, specially with Android team doing JetPack Composer and teaming with JetBrains on Kotlin/Native portability between iOS and Android. Long term, PWAs with WebGL and WebAssembly will take it all.
bananabreakfast 7y ago
Learning Dart is definitely not a large dev hurdle. Most people (esp. js devs) can read dart and understand what it is doing without ever having even seen the code before. I've found it takes an experienced engineer about two weeks to learn enough Go to be productive and Dart is honestly easier than that.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tatersolid 7y ago
  I have 20 C#/JS/SQL developers I want to put in a mobile project. So I’m supposed to eat an employee-year of salary to even consider Flutter+Dart? Not gonna happen, especially with Google’s track record. Already been burned by the Angular v1 -> v2+ nightmare.
novok 7y ago
If you are an iOS or Android developer already, learning dart vs the mess that is javascript seems more appealing. I would imagine something similar for non-JS backend developers. Web devs are not the only kind of developer out there.
dep_b 7y ago
- A million packages that never really seem to be in sync - A ton of different ways to do the same thing (Expo or not for example) - Documentation is always outdated - You still have to deal with the most annoying part of native apps, namely compilation and certification. If it was a book it would have the title: "Native apps: the shitty parts" - Doing the same thing twice with this package management and build system (or ten times...) can yield a different result - JavaScript is an awful language, TypeScript makes it more tolerable but you can't really escape the problems JavaScript has
je42 7y ago
I was part of a team who had to do two upgrades of the react native version. and every time, it was a pain taking weeks of developer productivity away. ... i wonder if React Native fixed this problem... but their track record is not the best...
- siquick 7y ago
  The 0.6 release brought in autolinking and a better integration with Cocoapods so worth checking out.
kdot 7y ago
Any competent dev will be functional in Dart in days. Flutter really is fantastic, I like being in Dart 90% of the time, no XML, no Storyboard. Currently employed on a Flutter project, hopefully jobs aspects improve.

pjmlp 7y ago

Hardly impressed with hot reloading, having done GUIs in Lisp, Smalltalk and Oberon. Plus the competition is stepping up, with Swift UI, Xamarin, Jetpack Compose hot reload support.

happa 7y ago
It's one thing to have hot reload and another to have it also preserve the whole app state like Dart/Flutter does.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  You mean like Common Lisp and Smalltalk do.
  - discreteevent 7y ago
    What's impressive is that they brought this experience to cross platform mobile. Reminds me of Guy Steele's quote about Java bringing the mainstream halfway to lisp but people could only complain.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      It is so impressive that now other platforms are adding it, thus proving the point that Dart is not a special snowflake. What Java brought, we already had in the form of Eiffel, Oberon, Modula-3, Smalltalk, Component Pascal, Dylan, they just suffered from not having Sun's budget offering a compiler and training materials for free. Now they are trying to bolt into Java, features that some of those languages already had, but Java 1.0 ditched them like value types, AOT compilation to native code and proper generics. I am betting that Dart will never have any relevant market share besides being the Flutter's language. Android team is betting on Kotlin/Native and Jetpack Composer, so lets see who will win the internal politics.

fulafel 7y ago

I think React Native had hot reloading before. At least the ClojureScript + React Native stuff did.