3 ms·

About Dart: it only got several people working on it and given proper attention because of Flutter... before Flutter, it was really close to die after the bet o

by brabel 3y ago

About Dart: it only got several people working on it and given proper attention because of Flutter... before Flutter, it was really close to die after the bet on replacing JS in browsers didn't work out. Flutter seems to be a revenue maker for Google (which should explain why it has gained so much attention - just look at the StackOverflow tag for Flutter, or their Youtube Channel - it's really, really active and the pub.dev package manager has grown immensely lately, to the point there's packages to do nearly anything in Dart/Flutter), but I am not sure how exactly given both Dart and Flutter are open source! Are the big users of Flutter giving Google big money?? Or how does that work?

zigzag312 3y ago
I would guess easy integration with Google's cloud services like Firebase and promotion of these services within Flutter's docs, brings more costumers these services.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
skybrian 3y ago
I worked on the Dart team at around that time. After integrating Dart into Chrome was cancelled, the team got moved from Chrome to Ads, because Ads was migrating all their websites from GWT to Dart. This isn't something anyone outside Google cares about, but it meant that it was consistently staffed as they looked for other big customers. Also, the ads codebase is enormous, so there are plenty of technical challenges from getting language infrastructure to scale to their needs. (Consider getting a language server for an IDE to scale up as a codebase grows, or making the language tools generate efficient JavaScript that's not unreasonably slow to download, or loading and displaying large tables in the browser.) I have no idea whether Flutter generates revenue directly. I'd guess not, but internal usage of Flutter is likely enough to justify having a team devoted to maintaining and improving it.
danielvaughn 3y ago
I'm curious why Dart was chosen over Go, seeing as Google created both, and Go has far more interest and activity.
- chairhairair 3y ago
  https://docs.flutter.dev/resources/faq#why-did-flutter-choose-to-use-dart https://docs.flutter.dev/resources/faq#why-did-flutter-choos... Lots of other links you can find that explain the choice.

by brabel 3y ago

zigzag312 3y ago

I would guess easy integration with Google's cloud services like Firebase and promotion of these services within Flutter's docs, brings more costumers these services.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

skybrian 3y ago

I worked on the Dart team at around that time. After integrating Dart into Chrome was cancelled, the team got moved from Chrome to Ads, because Ads was migrating all their websites from GWT to Dart. This isn't something anyone outside Google cares about, but it meant that it was consistently staffed as they looked for other big customers. Also, the ads codebase is enormous, so there are plenty of technical challenges from getting language infrastructure to scale to their needs. (Consider getting a language server for an IDE to scale up as a codebase grows, or making the language tools generate efficient JavaScript that's not unreasonably slow to download, or loading and displaying large tables in the browser.) I have no idea whether Flutter generates revenue directly. I'd guess not, but internal usage of Flutter is likely enough to justify having a team devoted to maintaining and improving it.

danielvaughn 3y ago

I'm curious why Dart was chosen over Go, seeing as Google created both, and Go has far more interest and activity.

chairhairair 3y ago
https://docs.flutter.dev/resources/faq#why-did-flutter-choose-to-use-dart https://docs.flutter.dev/resources/faq#why-did-flutter-choos... Lots of other links you can find that explain the choice.