4 ms·

Maybe it's just my laptop, but most Flutter apps I've tried were clunky and draining CPU like crazy. On top of that other people here have mentioned problems wi

Maybe it's just my laptop, but most Flutter apps I've tried were clunky and draining CPU like crazy. On top of that other people here have mentioned problems with the framework concept itself which causes certain bugs to just linger for years, because they can't be fixed. I don't really understand the excitement around flutter.

aero-glide2 5y ago
I have experienced the same performance performance on laptop and phone (Google pay).
defer 5y ago
I'm very conflicted with flutter. The developer story is tempting, cross platform consistency but extendable to each system's specifics. On the flip side there's the odd programming language, the bundle size, the game-engine like rendering (seemingly wasteful, but may improve as hardware evolves).
- asiachick 5y ago
  except their web story is horrific. they render the entire thing in a canvas which means a giant F.U. to non English-FIGS and a big F.U. to accessibility as well as extensions
  - defer 5y ago
    Definitely, I remember from reading the documentation that they could also target HTML5/css (https://docs.flutter.dev/development/tools/web-renderer https://docs.flutter.dev/development/tools/web-renderer) instead of canvas but I'm not sure how complete / coherent the output is.
  - mijoharas 5y ago
    what does FIGS stand for?
    - wffurr 5y ago
      A short search revealed that it’s a term of art in localization, referring to French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Typically these are the first targets when localizing an initially-English product. I have no idea what, if anything, Flutter’s canvas-based approach has to do with localization. Also Flutter exposes a hidden DOM with accessibility information for the canvas. This might someday be superseded by a system like AOM: Accessibility Object Model, which is an API for directly constructing an accessibility tree for non-DOM content like a canvas.
      - joezydeco 5y ago
        First thing that comes to mind (as a GUI developer that is currently translating a product) is that the text renderer can't handle accents above and below Latin characters. (e.g. Let's buy crème fraîche in Curaçao) I'd also be surprised if it can handle right-to-left strings as well.
        wffurr 5y ago
        Flutter uses Skia for text rendering and layout; the same rendering engine used by Chrome, Android, and others. I'm beyond confident it can handle all of those situations. Flutter demos have a localization dropdown for selecting different locales, of which the gallery demo at least supports many, well beyond FIGS: https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/ https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/ Note those demos have other problems that make me crazy, like the copious overuse of non-selectable text. Why the default "Text" widget is non-selectable is a total mystery to me: https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/Text-class.html https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/Text-class.html You have to instead use the "SelectableText" widget: https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/SelectableText-class.html https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/SelectableText-clas... I have plenty of complaints about Flutter, but accessibility and localization aren't among them.
        jhgb 5y ago
        Except Skia is not a text renderer. Skia won't correctly position glyphs for you. It can only render glyphs for you at positions that you provide.
- markdog12 5y ago
  I find it odd that you consider Dart an "odd programming language", given it is a very "mainstream" language. One of its core goals is to be unsurprising and easy to learn.
simonh 5y ago
Developing new stacks from top to bottom is crazy expensive and time consuming. Modern OSes have benefited from many decades of optimisation and you can't replicate that overnight. Even a far superior new architecture will start out worse in almost every way and take a long time to catch up. Just look at Apple's rollout of Swift. Early on it was slow and painful to use for a long time. In the last year or so it's really matured a lot, but it's been a long road and we're still not there yet for a lot of use cases.
brimble 5y ago
Yeah—the news that Fuchsia was embracing Flutter as the main way to develop applications was when my interest in it when from very high, to middling. May as well just be web apps at that point, for how they burn resources, latency, and overall feel. I was excited by the promise of an open-source QNX-like OS with a GUI layer that's not a complete mess (like the Unix-alike open source world's is) but it seems like they're heading toward something closer to ChromeOS, which I emphatically do not want.
- surajrmal 5y ago
  Flutter is the easiest way to write GUI applications on Fuchsia today, but by no means the only one. There already exists a Wayland to Scenic translation layer. Adding support to Gnome or KDE is totally possible. There is even a rust GUI framework under development in the fuchsia codebase called Carnelian. Like Linux, there is no concept of native platform widgets on Fuchsia. It is up to a product developer to build up those types of layers. The Workstation product may build up such a toolkit of native widgets, but that won't bound the possibilities of what you can do with Fuchsia.

aero-glide2 5y ago

I have experienced the same performance performance on laptop and phone (Google pay).

defer 5y ago

I'm very conflicted with flutter. The developer story is tempting, cross platform consistency but extendable to each system's specifics. On the flip side there's the odd programming language, the bundle size, the game-engine like rendering (seemingly wasteful, but may improve as hardware evolves).

asiachick 5y ago
except their web story is horrific. they render the entire thing in a canvas which means a giant F.U. to non English-FIGS and a big F.U. to accessibility as well as extensions
- defer 5y ago
  Definitely, I remember from reading the documentation that they could also target HTML5/css (https://docs.flutter.dev/development/tools/web-renderer https://docs.flutter.dev/development/tools/web-renderer) instead of canvas but I'm not sure how complete / coherent the output is.
- mijoharas 5y ago
  what does FIGS stand for?
  - wffurr 5y ago
    A short search revealed that it’s a term of art in localization, referring to French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Typically these are the first targets when localizing an initially-English product. I have no idea what, if anything, Flutter’s canvas-based approach has to do with localization. Also Flutter exposes a hidden DOM with accessibility information for the canvas. This might someday be superseded by a system like AOM: Accessibility Object Model, which is an API for directly constructing an accessibility tree for non-DOM content like a canvas.
    - joezydeco 5y ago
      First thing that comes to mind (as a GUI developer that is currently translating a product) is that the text renderer can't handle accents above and below Latin characters. (e.g. Let's buy crème fraîche in Curaçao) I'd also be surprised if it can handle right-to-left strings as well.
      - wffurr 5y ago
        Flutter uses Skia for text rendering and layout; the same rendering engine used by Chrome, Android, and others. I'm beyond confident it can handle all of those situations. Flutter demos have a localization dropdown for selecting different locales, of which the gallery demo at least supports many, well beyond FIGS: https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/ https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/ Note those demos have other problems that make me crazy, like the copious overuse of non-selectable text. Why the default "Text" widget is non-selectable is a total mystery to me: https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/Text-class.html https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/widgets/Text-class.html You have to instead use the "SelectableText" widget: https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/SelectableText-class.html https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/SelectableText-clas... I have plenty of complaints about Flutter, but accessibility and localization aren't among them.
        jhgb 5y ago
        Except Skia is not a text renderer. Skia won't correctly position glyphs for you. It can only render glyphs for you at positions that you provide.
markdog12 5y ago
I find it odd that you consider Dart an "odd programming language", given it is a very "mainstream" language. One of its core goals is to be unsurprising and easy to learn.

simonh 5y ago

Developing new stacks from top to bottom is crazy expensive and time consuming. Modern OSes have benefited from many decades of optimisation and you can't replicate that overnight. Even a far superior new architecture will start out worse in almost every way and take a long time to catch up. Just look at Apple's rollout of Swift. Early on it was slow and painful to use for a long time. In the last year or so it's really matured a lot, but it's been a long road and we're still not there yet for a lot of use cases.

brimble 5y ago

Yeah—the news that Fuchsia was embracing Flutter as the main way to develop applications was when my interest in it when from very high, to middling. May as well just be web apps at that point, for how they burn resources, latency, and overall feel. I was excited by the promise of an open-source QNX-like OS with a GUI layer that's not a complete mess (like the Unix-alike open source world's is) but it seems like they're heading toward something closer to ChromeOS, which I emphatically do not want.

surajrmal 5y ago
Flutter is the easiest way to write GUI applications on Fuchsia today, but by no means the only one. There already exists a Wayland to Scenic translation layer. Adding support to Gnome or KDE is totally possible. There is even a rust GUI framework under development in the fuchsia codebase called Carnelian. Like Linux, there is no concept of native platform widgets on Fuchsia. It is up to a product developer to build up those types of layers. The Workstation product may build up such a toolkit of native widgets, but that won't bound the possibilities of what you can do with Fuchsia.