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"I just wish Google had built Flutter on a low level core that isn't tied to Dart, so it would be usable from other languages." Exactly. Dart is a deal-breaker

"I just wish Google had built Flutter on a low level core that isn't tied to Dart, so it would be usable from other languages." Exactly. Dart is a deal-breaker. I was tasked with choosing a cross-platform development solution, and rejected Flutter because nobody at my company (including me) knows Dart or has time to learn it. Nor would any contractors we were likely to find know it. After quite a bit of research on other potential solutions, I determined (as did a crowded and lengthy thread in this forum) that Qt was the only viable one for now. The recent proliferation of languages has been pretty annoying. Google should have at least used Kotlin. Alienating their own community of Android developers and making Flutter a pain in the ass to integrate into a development organization was dumb. The other problem people cited with alleged cross-platform solutions is the need to write native code anyway if you need access to system/hardware resources (Bluetooth, USB, what have you).

the_duke 4y ago
To be fair: Dart is relatively straight forward and simple to learn. You should have decently qualified developers be productive within a week. But forcing a new language on people usually doesn't go well.
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  Sure, I'm not trashing the language, because I know nothing about it. Our whole dev team is C/C++, with random people who know Python and a few other things. I'm the only one who knows Swift. They're bright people and not hostile toward new ideas, but they're already overtaxed and can't cater to an outlier project written in a language no one knows and built on a framework no one knows.
  - postalrat 4y ago
    - adwn 4y ago
      I really dislike C and C++, but I think your comment is needlessly hostile and insulting to C and C++ developers, and it doesn't add anything of value to this discussion. Please consider rewriting or deleting it.
  - Okawari 4y ago
    Speaking from personal experience I found the process of using dart to be VERY painless. I'm mostly a web developer, but have taken some Java courses in college and have dabbled in a bit of C# outside of my normal PHP/JS work. We decided to take on an app project at work. We had made one using nativescript-vue, but the experience left much to be desired and I wanted to look for alternatives. A friend had talked favorably about Flutter so I decided to install and check it out. Within a few hours, I had a pretty good looking MVP of the app we were building (it was very basic to begin with). The experience developing a Flutter app was really good. It felt like I already knew the language from the get go. It worked pretty much as expected. I only had to google things like async/await because dart writes their functions like `(arg) async => expr` while javascript puts the async before the function `async arg => expr`. YMMV if you're not using the languages which Dart draws inspiration from I guess. But I'dd be surprised if you feel you would need to spend significant amount of time learning Dart.
Larrikin 4y ago
Flutter and Dart seemed to have been internal tools built by engineers looking for an interesting project to spend their time on while at Google. Kotlin swelled up around the limitations of Java 8 in outside organizations and took over the ecosystem so Android devs could be productive while Google was fighting with Oracle
- kaba0 4y ago
  Java was already open-source at the time so the court fight’s outcome was meaningless from the view of what language to choose. And Android would have been much better off if they didn’t fork the whole ecosystem and just used OpenJDK, perhaps with an added low-memory GC.
nmfisher 4y ago
I think that's pretty short-sighted. Dart is hardly an esoteric/niche language like Haskell or Futhark, anyone familiar with Java/Javascript/TypeScript should be able to pick it up in a day or so. Flutter's performance issues, on the other hand, is a separate story.
- busymom0 4y ago
  > Flutter's performance issues, on the other hand, is a separate story. Can you expand on that? I know react native has performance issues but does Flutter have it too? Why?
  - wiseowise 4y ago
    React native has less performance issues, since it uses native toolkit. Flutter draws whole ui by itself: welcome to blinking cursor that consumes 5-15% CPU in idle.
    - busymom0 4y ago
      I don't think that's accurate. Seems like native apps have the best performance but Flutter comes a close second. React native on the other is much slower: https://medium.com/swlh/flutter-vs-native-vs-react-native-examining-performance-31338f081980 https://medium.com/swlh/flutter-vs-native-vs-react-native-ex...
    - chakkepolja 4y ago
      > welcome to blinking cursor that consumes 5-15% CPU in idle. Citation? Flutter draws its own UI but game engines do that too. All code in flutter compiles down to native code. > React native has less performance issues, since it uses native toolkit. In theory.
      - fauigerzigerk 4y ago
        >Citation? https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/59327 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/59327 This has been a long-standing issue that has completely ruled out Flutter for us. E.g, the Flutterfolio idle login screen uses 14% CPU on my Mac. For a while it sounded like Google was saying that it can't be fixed. But I think they have done some work to address this issue. I'll be very interested in finding out whether it has been fixed in Flutter 3.
CrimsonRain 4y ago
I wrote extensive amount of Dart without even reading documentation and any prior Dart experience. Knowing dart is never an issue if you know basic Java/Php/JavaScript. The only thing I really hated about Dart was poor enum support. Now that's fixed.

the_duke 4y ago

To be fair: Dart is relatively straight forward and simple to learn. You should have decently qualified developers be productive within a week. But forcing a new language on people usually doesn't go well.

NonNefarious 4y ago
Sure, I'm not trashing the language, because I know nothing about it. Our whole dev team is C/C++, with random people who know Python and a few other things. I'm the only one who knows Swift. They're bright people and not hostile toward new ideas, but they're already overtaxed and can't cater to an outlier project written in a language no one knows and built on a framework no one knows.
- postalrat 4y ago
  - adwn 4y ago
    I really dislike C and C++, but I think your comment is needlessly hostile and insulting to C and C++ developers, and it doesn't add anything of value to this discussion. Please consider rewriting or deleting it.
- Okawari 4y ago
  Speaking from personal experience I found the process of using dart to be VERY painless. I'm mostly a web developer, but have taken some Java courses in college and have dabbled in a bit of C# outside of my normal PHP/JS work. We decided to take on an app project at work. We had made one using nativescript-vue, but the experience left much to be desired and I wanted to look for alternatives. A friend had talked favorably about Flutter so I decided to install and check it out. Within a few hours, I had a pretty good looking MVP of the app we were building (it was very basic to begin with). The experience developing a Flutter app was really good. It felt like I already knew the language from the get go. It worked pretty much as expected. I only had to google things like async/await because dart writes their functions like `(arg) async => expr` while javascript puts the async before the function `async arg => expr`. YMMV if you're not using the languages which Dart draws inspiration from I guess. But I'dd be surprised if you feel you would need to spend significant amount of time learning Dart.

Larrikin 4y ago

Flutter and Dart seemed to have been internal tools built by engineers looking for an interesting project to spend their time on while at Google. Kotlin swelled up around the limitations of Java 8 in outside organizations and took over the ecosystem so Android devs could be productive while Google was fighting with Oracle

kaba0 4y ago
Java was already open-source at the time so the court fight’s outcome was meaningless from the view of what language to choose. And Android would have been much better off if they didn’t fork the whole ecosystem and just used OpenJDK, perhaps with an added low-memory GC.

nmfisher 4y ago

I think that's pretty short-sighted. Dart is hardly an esoteric/niche language like Haskell or Futhark, anyone familiar with Java/Javascript/TypeScript should be able to pick it up in a day or so. Flutter's performance issues, on the other hand, is a separate story.

busymom0 4y ago
> Flutter's performance issues, on the other hand, is a separate story. Can you expand on that? I know react native has performance issues but does Flutter have it too? Why?
- wiseowise 4y ago
  React native has less performance issues, since it uses native toolkit. Flutter draws whole ui by itself: welcome to blinking cursor that consumes 5-15% CPU in idle.
  - busymom0 4y ago
    I don't think that's accurate. Seems like native apps have the best performance but Flutter comes a close second. React native on the other is much slower: https://medium.com/swlh/flutter-vs-native-vs-react-native-examining-performance-31338f081980 https://medium.com/swlh/flutter-vs-native-vs-react-native-ex...
  - chakkepolja 4y ago
    > welcome to blinking cursor that consumes 5-15% CPU in idle. Citation? Flutter draws its own UI but game engines do that too. All code in flutter compiles down to native code. > React native has less performance issues, since it uses native toolkit. In theory.
    - fauigerzigerk 4y ago
      >Citation? https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/59327 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/59327 This has been a long-standing issue that has completely ruled out Flutter for us. E.g, the Flutterfolio idle login screen uses 14% CPU on my Mac. For a while it sounded like Google was saying that it can't be fixed. But I think they have done some work to address this issue. I'll be very interested in finding out whether it has been fixed in Flutter 3.

CrimsonRain 4y ago

I wrote extensive amount of Dart without even reading documentation and any prior Dart experience. Knowing dart is never an issue if you know basic Java/Php/JavaScript. The only thing I really hated about Dart was poor enum support. Now that's fixed.