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I have little to add to the article in question, but I’d like to say that I’ve fallen quite in love with Flutter and Dart. I think of Dart as being C#-lite, al

by vsnf 3y ago

I have little to add to the article in question, but I’d like to say that I’ve fallen quite in love with Flutter and Dart. I think of Dart as being C#-lite, although the latest changes with class modifiers have somewhat complicated the sentiment. For reference, my background is in OOP/JavaScript land, with patches of Scheme, Rust, and way more Go than I ever wanted. I really think Dart is one of my favorite languages, it’s just a joy to work in. Clean, fast enough, and to my experience so far, footgun free. I also know @munificent here is a principal developer of the language, and he’s done a good job. (But in case he’s listening, please add Rusts discriminated enums, it really hurts to move from a language with them to a language without them.) As for Flutter, as a WinForms and UWP developer, coming to terms with its Dart-declared UIs was tricky, especially when coupled with the constraints based layout system. But I’ve long since crossed the threshold in my mind, and now I can strongly say I don’t want to program UIs in anything else again. The one real complaint I can agree with is that the ecosystem kind of sucks, but it’s growing and getting better. I’ve seen some profound growth in the area over the last two years.

agacera 3y ago
> (But in case he’s listening, please add Rusts discriminated enums, it really hurts to move from a language with them to a language without them.) I'm not a programming language expert, but my understanding is that discrimitated enums is jut a way to support sum types. Dart now has the sealed class modifier [1], that fills this role. https://dart.dev/language/class-modifiers#sealed https://dart.dev/language/class-modifiers#sealed
cageface 3y ago
I recently had an idea for an app that would work on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android (and maybe even Linux). After considering the options I decided to prototype it in Flutter and so far I've been pleasantly surprised. Despite having to learn a new language and UI framework I've made rapid progress and I've been able to find solid third party packages for most of what I've needed that isn't in the framework itself. Even calling into native code via FFI was surprisingly straightforward and the ffigen tool worked without a hitch. Passing off heavy CPU work to background workers was also trivially easy. Dart isn't a flashy language but it's easy to learn and overall I much prefer it to the JS I have to deal with in my day job. My main hesitation now is Google's longer term commitment to Flutter. They seem to be putting a lot of resources into it at the moment but who knows if that will be true a few years from now?

by vsnf 3y ago

agacera 3y ago

> (But in case he’s listening, please add Rusts discriminated enums, it really hurts to move from a language with them to a language without them.) I'm not a programming language expert, but my understanding is that discrimitated enums is jut a way to support sum types. Dart now has the sealed class modifier [1], that fills this role. https://dart.dev/language/class-modifiers#sealed https://dart.dev/language/class-modifiers#sealed

cageface 3y ago

I recently had an idea for an app that would work on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android (and maybe even Linux). After considering the options I decided to prototype it in Flutter and so far I've been pleasantly surprised. Despite having to learn a new language and UI framework I've made rapid progress and I've been able to find solid third party packages for most of what I've needed that isn't in the framework itself. Even calling into native code via FFI was surprisingly straightforward and the ffigen tool worked without a hitch. Passing off heavy CPU work to background workers was also trivially easy. Dart isn't a flashy language but it's easy to learn and overall I much prefer it to the JS I have to deal with in my day job. My main hesitation now is Google's longer term commitment to Flutter. They seem to be putting a lot of resources into it at the moment but who knows if that will be true a few years from now?