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threejs/babylon are awesome projects! For me, the main drawback is that they are JS/web frameworks, whereas Thermion (and Flutter/Dart more generally) gives you

threejs/babylon are awesome projects! For me, the main drawback is that they are JS/web frameworks, whereas Thermion (and Flutter/Dart more generally) gives you a cross-platform rendering + UI framework out of the box (and statically-typed, if that's important to you). I've heard that react-three-fiber lets you build ThreeJS into React Native apps, though? So that may be changing. I'll need to check it out first-hand and see if that's the case. I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on Flutter, I'm a big fan :)

m_kos 2y ago
AFAIR, there are also some 3D graphics libraries for Kotlin Multiplatform. I have the hardest time figuring out whether I should use Kotlin, Dart/Flutter, or React for building an iOS and Android app. I don't care about the GUI part, but I want easy access to all APIs (like Health Kit, Health Connect, sensors) and relatively stress-free development. When I was learning Flutter a few years ago, it was very frustrating because its documentation and username were scant and scarce. Is it better nowadays?
- nmfisher 2y ago
  If your main goal is easy access to platform APIs, then I would probably stick with the native language/UI toolkits. Flutter is a UI framework; if you don’t care about making cross-platform UIs then there’s no real reason to use it. If you’re mostly working with platform APIs, you’ll probably be using the native languages (Kotlin/Swift) anyway (unless someone’s already written a Flutter plugin, which often isn't the case).
localfirst 2y ago
im not so sure that performance hinderance is noticeable since RAM prices have been in free fall sure I appreciate native compilation, flutter does achieve that tough problem quite well but coming from JS world, its like, man do i have to redo the gymnastics all over again? so going in my attitude wasn't great I admit but so far babylonjs/electron/REI seems to provide good enough 3D performance even though on older computers it stutters i think one promising vector is if you can turn JS devs like me into generating flutter projects. that would dramatically lower the barrier.

m_kos 2y ago

AFAIR, there are also some 3D graphics libraries for Kotlin Multiplatform. I have the hardest time figuring out whether I should use Kotlin, Dart/Flutter, or React for building an iOS and Android app. I don't care about the GUI part, but I want easy access to all APIs (like Health Kit, Health Connect, sensors) and relatively stress-free development. When I was learning Flutter a few years ago, it was very frustrating because its documentation and username were scant and scarce. Is it better nowadays?

nmfisher 2y ago
If your main goal is easy access to platform APIs, then I would probably stick with the native language/UI toolkits. Flutter is a UI framework; if you don’t care about making cross-platform UIs then there’s no real reason to use it. If you’re mostly working with platform APIs, you’ll probably be using the native languages (Kotlin/Swift) anyway (unless someone’s already written a Flutter plugin, which often isn't the case).

localfirst 2y ago

im not so sure that performance hinderance is noticeable since RAM prices have been in free fall sure I appreciate native compilation, flutter does achieve that tough problem quite well but coming from JS world, its like, man do i have to redo the gymnastics all over again? so going in my attitude wasn't great I admit but so far babylonjs/electron/REI seems to provide good enough 3D performance even though on older computers it stutters i think one promising vector is if you can turn JS devs like me into generating flutter projects. that would dramatically lower the barrier.