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Curious what platforms you're interested in integrating with. We're experimenting here and looking for feedback. As a fun demonstration of the effectiveness of

Curious what platforms you're interested in integrating with. We're experimenting here and looking for feedback. As a fun demonstration of the effectiveness of FFI, you can now build Petzold-style native Windows code with Dart: https://github.com/timsneath/win32/blob/master/example/hello.dart https://github.com/timsneath/win32/blob/master/example/hello... And here's a 500-line version of the Kilo console text editor built with Dart: https://github.com/timsneath/dart_console/blob/master/example/kilo.dart https://github.com/timsneath/dart_console/blob/master/exampl... Unlike the original, it runs on both Windows and UNIX-based operating systems.

vetinari 6y ago
I'm actually more interested in Linux side of things. That doesn't prevent me from looking how things are done on Windows, of course. To be fair, last time I looked into dart, the idea of FFI was ports, which was too overcomplicated and undercapable, if you needed something like Gtk or Vulkan. Looking into it now, I see the dart:ffi package is shaping up nicely, so I will have another look at dart again.
malkia 6y ago
Tim, it should be possible that the main .exe (or binary on linux/osx) to export functions, and they can be found back through the flutter_engine.dll/.so, right? (At least on windows it's possible for the exe to __declspec(dllexport) things, not sure on Linux). But even if not, if there is a way to (given might be slow and tedious) to compile what would've been flutter_engine.dll statically linked to your main (host) app, and maybe somewhat hinting here is how to find the "GetProcAddr/dlsym/etc." functions - if one is to look for them. Further on, the generated from dart .so file can be embded (as resource? or slapped at the end of the binary/.exe?) + slapping all other resource - resulting in single app :) I know it's possible, just not so easy to support it (I guess). It's similar to have java/python can be packed into one executable with all C/C++ ffi functions they call (at cost of some build time and effort to achieve so). Then you'll have killer platform for video conferencing (zoom, bluejeans, etc.), messaging (slack, etc.) - and just single binary to deploy. (Oh, on top of that slap a web server into it, and make it that if called with specific command-line option, now it acts as web-server, and the app is visible through the web).

vetinari 6y ago

I'm actually more interested in Linux side of things. That doesn't prevent me from looking how things are done on Windows, of course. To be fair, last time I looked into dart, the idea of FFI was ports, which was too overcomplicated and undercapable, if you needed something like Gtk or Vulkan. Looking into it now, I see the dart:ffi package is shaping up nicely, so I will have another look at dart again.

malkia 6y ago

Tim, it should be possible that the main .exe (or binary on linux/osx) to export functions, and they can be found back through the flutter_engine.dll/.so, right? (At least on windows it's possible for the exe to __declspec(dllexport) things, not sure on Linux). But even if not, if there is a way to (given might be slow and tedious) to compile what would've been flutter_engine.dll statically linked to your main (host) app, and maybe somewhat hinting here is how to find the "GetProcAddr/dlsym/etc." functions - if one is to look for them. Further on, the generated from dart .so file can be embded (as resource? or slapped at the end of the binary/.exe?) + slapping all other resource - resulting in single app :) I know it's possible, just not so easy to support it (I guess). It's similar to have java/python can be packed into one executable with all C/C++ ffi functions they call (at cost of some build time and effort to achieve so). Then you'll have killer platform for video conferencing (zoom, bluejeans, etc.), messaging (slack, etc.) - and just single binary to deploy. (Oh, on top of that slap a web server into it, and make it that if called with specific command-line option, now it acts as web-server, and the app is visible through the web).