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This is a classic issue of leaky abstractions, so it is definitely "caused" by Flutter/Dart. What led to this might not be their "fault", but as it stands this

by ratww 4y ago

This is a classic issue of leaky abstractions, so it is definitely "caused" by Flutter/Dart. What led to this might not be their "fault", but as it stands this is something that only Flutter/Dart can solve. It is not strictly necessary to use Gradle/Groovy to build an Android app, so to use it was Flutter/Dart's choice. Just as it isn't necessary to use Xcode, Cocoapods or Ruby (of course, you still need either Objective-C or Swift, but only one) to make an iOS one. Same for Oboe: it could be prebuilt rather than leaving it all to you (although depending on how you're using it, it's debatable if it's Flutter/Dart's concern). The bottom part of the stack doesn't have control over the top part. Gradle can't really modify itself so that Flutter's abstraction is no longer leaky. Save for some ruling by Google/Apple/etc, the reason you need the whole stack is not because of some fundamental need, but rather because it was a choice made by the tools at the top of it.

bsder 4y ago
> It is not strictly necessary to use Gradle/Groovy to build an Android app, so to use it was Flutter/Dart's choice. Just as it isn't necessary to use Xcode, Cocoapods or Ruby (of course, you still need either Objective-C or Swift, but only one) to make an iOS one. This may all be technically and pedantically true, but I have never seen an app built without either of those stacks. And I've been doing this an awful long time.
- ratww 4y ago
  Yeah, because of a technical choice made by higher level tools. And I've worked on a few games that didn't need some of those. On iOS's side there's Swift Build Sysyem and Swift Package Manager that almost remove the need for Xcode. And there's also things like Cordova where some of those things are used but fiddling with them isn't needed for 99% of the cases. It's funny how this is similar in the frontend where people constantly complain about the tooling, but as soon as they hear that apps can be built without bundlers/transpilers (because modern browsers support A LOT of things), but go "yeahhhhhh right but in practice you need webpack because I never seen anything without it in my super vast experience of building the same thing over and over and over". Well...

by ratww 4y ago

bsder 4y ago

> It is not strictly necessary to use Gradle/Groovy to build an Android app, so to use it was Flutter/Dart's choice. Just as it isn't necessary to use Xcode, Cocoapods or Ruby (of course, you still need either Objective-C or Swift, but only one) to make an iOS one. This may all be technically and pedantically true, but I have never seen an app built without either of those stacks. And I've been doing this an awful long time.

ratww 4y ago
Yeah, because of a technical choice made by higher level tools. And I've worked on a few games that didn't need some of those. On iOS's side there's Swift Build Sysyem and Swift Package Manager that almost remove the need for Xcode. And there's also things like Cordova where some of those things are used but fiddling with them isn't needed for 99% of the cases. It's funny how this is similar in the frontend where people constantly complain about the tooling, but as soon as they hear that apps can be built without bundlers/transpilers (because modern browsers support A LOT of things), but go "yeahhhhhh right but in practice you need webpack because I never seen anything without it in my super vast experience of building the same thing over and over and over". Well...