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I don't understand why this language exists. It just feels like a promotion vehicle by someone at Google who had enough clout to then get it shoehorned in to Fl

by tjpnz 3y ago

I don't understand why this language exists. It just feels like a promotion vehicle by someone at Google who had enough clout to then get it shoehorned in to Flutter. If they had gone with JavaScript they could've made the switch to TypeScript later on. I realise this is being said with the benefit of hindsight but Flutter would be in a far better place today I suspect.

zigzag312 3y ago
It compiles AOT to native code and supports tree shaking. It also has JIT mode with hot reloading/restarting. It has sound null safety and is statically typed. It's not a bad language. It just lacks some needed features. They'll probably get implemented over a span of a few years. Ecosystem is small, but at least there's FFI interop. It also has some baggage from it's early days when it was meant as JavaScript replacement. Since we now have WASM (and soon WASM-GC) I think it would be best, if compilation to JS would be dropped, so more low level features can be implemented.
- SpaghettiCthulu 3y ago
  > It's not a bad language. I agree. The team behind the language is the real problem. > It just lacks some needed features. They'll probably get implemented over a span of a few years. For years they have dismissed calls to add multi-threading in the language, despite it being sorely needed for anything computationally non-trivial (isolates have ridiculous overhead).
- bsder 3y ago
  > Ecosystem is small, but at least there's FFI interop. FFI continues to be a disaster (to be fair, this is not unique to Dart/Flutter). The biggest problem with any cross-platform system on mobile is always getting performance out of the native interop. It's often easier to ship a computation to a server on the web and ship teh result back rather than execute it natively on another thread on the bloody phone. It's infuriating. We have a zillion cores, and every single phone OS tries it's damnedest to prevent you from using them because, heaven forbid, you might actually use up some of the battery. The Horror! The Horror! The cross-platform systems for phones are really good at doing puzzle games or CRUD. Step outside of that and you enter "Here Be Dragons" territory very quickly.
pjmlp 3y ago
The language exists because of AdWords, they had recently migrated from GWT to AngularDart when everything fell down, regarding Chrome team jumping off the DartiumVM integration, eventually with all this process most key designers like Gilad Bracha, and Kasper Lund leaving the project. When Flutter came around, for whatever reason they decided to pick Dart, the original prototype was in JavaScript (the official reason being it wasn't good enough given the language semantics), and Dart 2.0 effort started, with the language gaining strong typing (it was dynamic with optional typing in Dart 1.0), and AOT compilation support.

by tjpnz 3y ago

zigzag312 3y ago

It compiles AOT to native code and supports tree shaking. It also has JIT mode with hot reloading/restarting. It has sound null safety and is statically typed. It's not a bad language. It just lacks some needed features. They'll probably get implemented over a span of a few years. Ecosystem is small, but at least there's FFI interop. It also has some baggage from it's early days when it was meant as JavaScript replacement. Since we now have WASM (and soon WASM-GC) I think it would be best, if compilation to JS would be dropped, so more low level features can be implemented.

SpaghettiCthulu 3y ago
> It's not a bad language. I agree. The team behind the language is the real problem. > It just lacks some needed features. They'll probably get implemented over a span of a few years. For years they have dismissed calls to add multi-threading in the language, despite it being sorely needed for anything computationally non-trivial (isolates have ridiculous overhead).
bsder 3y ago
> Ecosystem is small, but at least there's FFI interop. FFI continues to be a disaster (to be fair, this is not unique to Dart/Flutter). The biggest problem with any cross-platform system on mobile is always getting performance out of the native interop. It's often easier to ship a computation to a server on the web and ship teh result back rather than execute it natively on another thread on the bloody phone. It's infuriating. We have a zillion cores, and every single phone OS tries it's damnedest to prevent you from using them because, heaven forbid, you might actually use up some of the battery. The Horror! The Horror! The cross-platform systems for phones are really good at doing puzzle games or CRUD. Step outside of that and you enter "Here Be Dragons" territory very quickly.

pjmlp 3y ago

The language exists because of AdWords, they had recently migrated from GWT to AngularDart when everything fell down, regarding Chrome team jumping off the DartiumVM integration, eventually with all this process most key designers like Gilad Bracha, and Kasper Lund leaving the project. When Flutter came around, for whatever reason they decided to pick Dart, the original prototype was in JavaScript (the official reason being it wasn't good enough given the language semantics), and Dart 2.0 effort started, with the language gaining strong typing (it was dynamic with optional typing in Dart 1.0), and AOT compilation support.