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Great presentation. Also, really not surprising at all. Anyone that has tried getting a sample Flutter app running on a desktop will quickly find that it's shoc

Great presentation. Also, really not surprising at all. Anyone that has tried getting a sample Flutter app running on a desktop will quickly find that it's shockingly easy and on almost all platforms will "just work" despite being in Alpha. The development experience in Flutter is great too. Anything that can help with that when developing for embedded systems is likely very tempting. I am curious why they went with Weston as their Wayland compositor as opposed to Mutter, if only because it seems to be the most popular due to Gnome. I'm not familiar enough with the trade-offs between the two. Anyone care to theorize why?

sho_hn 6y ago
Weston has better support for some things embedded developers care about, e.g. fallback codepaths for multi-plane buffer formats doing the blend in a shader, support for certain deprecated protocols (e.g. ivi-shell) and partial support for using hardware overlay planes for power-conscious compositing. It also doesn't have any of the Gnome dependencies. These are blanket statements; the devil is very often deep in the details. Depending on the OEM you work for and how vertically integrated your organization is, you may also have a large and complex supply chain catering towards your products, with complicated RASIC matrices for who supplies you want and vendors held to KPIs for their BSP and their hardware. Due to various factors Weston may be what they already have patches in hand for, e.g. for proprietary buffer integration, etc. (I work on KDE Plasma, including its Wayland support, and am a system architect for a large automotive OEM making Wayland-based infotainment systems, neither of which use Weston however.)
- ZeroCool2u 6y ago
  That makes a lot of sense, thanks for the insight!
- fmntf 6y ago
  Is the IVI shell deprecated? I work in the automotive and that's what we are currently using.
DonnyV 6y ago
I wouldn't say its shockingly easy to get a desktop app running. Its buried under a tag and sometimes doesn't compile on Windows. Unless something recently has changed.
- cbolton 6y ago
  I tried it recently on Linux, it was just a matter of: flutter channel dev flutter upgrade flutter config --enable-linux-desktop The app then built without issue, and executed fine... except for a rather annoying bug: nothing was painted in the window until I resized it.
  - malkia 6y ago
    sometimes you may need to recrate the "linux" folder - either by "flutter create ." or "rm -rf linux", "flutter create ." (same for other folders, like "web", "windows", etc.) - ideally there should not be code there that can't be auto-generated (but not always)
blub 6y ago
It is both surprising and unsurprising... Unsurprising because it's not the first time Sony bet on an unusual language (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1938652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1938652) and people on HN were similarly excited. Days later the initiative was put on hold and the domain doesn't even resolve today. I think it's safe to say that their initiative did not end up as a huge success. Surprising because according to their own presentation they want to use an alpha version technology created by a company which is known to be cancelling projects on a whim and which is not really using said technology for anything important. A decade later one things remains clear: you can count on HNers to jump on any obscure programming language and praise it to the skies.
- Hixie 6y ago
  Flutter's Wayland support is used by Google for a consumer product with millions of users. (source: I work for Google.)
  - cercatrova 6y ago
    Which product is that? I didn't realize Flutter had a Linux dominant product already.
    - mekkkkkk 6y ago
      Not the OP, but I have heard that the google assistants with screens run Flutter.
  - mwcampbell 6y ago
    Does that mass-market consumer product have proper accessibility support, e.g. for blind users? If so, is that somehow implemented within the Flutter UI, or parallel to it (e.g. as a separate voice interface)?
    - ZeroCool2u 6y ago
      I think the parent comment was talking about Nest Hubs / Google Homes, which are arguably voice first via the Google Assistant. I can only imagine but if I had, much more significant, vision issues then I think I'd use it even more.

sho_hn 6y ago

Weston has better support for some things embedded developers care about, e.g. fallback codepaths for multi-plane buffer formats doing the blend in a shader, support for certain deprecated protocols (e.g. ivi-shell) and partial support for using hardware overlay planes for power-conscious compositing. It also doesn't have any of the Gnome dependencies. These are blanket statements; the devil is very often deep in the details. Depending on the OEM you work for and how vertically integrated your organization is, you may also have a large and complex supply chain catering towards your products, with complicated RASIC matrices for who supplies you want and vendors held to KPIs for their BSP and their hardware. Due to various factors Weston may be what they already have patches in hand for, e.g. for proprietary buffer integration, etc. (I work on KDE Plasma, including its Wayland support, and am a system architect for a large automotive OEM making Wayland-based infotainment systems, neither of which use Weston however.)

ZeroCool2u 6y ago
That makes a lot of sense, thanks for the insight!
fmntf 6y ago
Is the IVI shell deprecated? I work in the automotive and that's what we are currently using.

DonnyV 6y ago

I wouldn't say its shockingly easy to get a desktop app running. Its buried under a tag and sometimes doesn't compile on Windows. Unless something recently has changed.

cbolton 6y ago
I tried it recently on Linux, it was just a matter of: flutter channel dev flutter upgrade flutter config --enable-linux-desktop The app then built without issue, and executed fine... except for a rather annoying bug: nothing was painted in the window until I resized it.
- malkia 6y ago
  sometimes you may need to recrate the "linux" folder - either by "flutter create ." or "rm -rf linux", "flutter create ." (same for other folders, like "web", "windows", etc.) - ideally there should not be code there that can't be auto-generated (but not always)

blub 6y ago

It is both surprising and unsurprising... Unsurprising because it's not the first time Sony bet on an unusual language (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1938652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1938652) and people on HN were similarly excited. Days later the initiative was put on hold and the domain doesn't even resolve today. I think it's safe to say that their initiative did not end up as a huge success. Surprising because according to their own presentation they want to use an alpha version technology created by a company which is known to be cancelling projects on a whim and which is not really using said technology for anything important. A decade later one things remains clear: you can count on HNers to jump on any obscure programming language and praise it to the skies.

Hixie 6y ago
Flutter's Wayland support is used by Google for a consumer product with millions of users. (source: I work for Google.)
- cercatrova 6y ago
  Which product is that? I didn't realize Flutter had a Linux dominant product already.
  - mekkkkkk 6y ago
    Not the OP, but I have heard that the google assistants with screens run Flutter.
- mwcampbell 6y ago
  Does that mass-market consumer product have proper accessibility support, e.g. for blind users? If so, is that somehow implemented within the Flutter UI, or parallel to it (e.g. as a separate voice interface)?
  - ZeroCool2u 6y ago
    I think the parent comment was talking about Nest Hubs / Google Homes, which are arguably voice first via the Google Assistant. I can only imagine but if I had, much more significant, vision issues then I think I'd use it even more.