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Flutter 3.47
- orishlez 2mo ago[flagged]
- jimbob45 2mo agoOf all the myriad projects from Google, how is Flutter/Dart the one that survived the axe? I’m not saying I hate them - I think they’re both really neat - I just don’t understand why Google keeps these limping along with weak support and no clear vision within their broader web ecosystem.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- monocasa 2mo agoGoogle internally uses dart, and I remember hearing that adwords in particular was rewritten in dart at least for the frontend relatively recently. So they're probably investing in it enough for basic maintenance, but don't really care about evolving the language.
- skybrian 2mo agoSure, Adwords migrated from GWT to Dart. (And eventually I followed.) At one point, Dart moved from the Chrome division to the Adwords division. And Adwords alone can fund a team to do developer tools for them. Then, Flutter came a bit later. It's been over a decade since then, though, and I'm out of touch now.
- vmg12 2mo agoEasy, there are a few google teams that use flutter and the cost savings from not having to have dedicated ios and android teams is very easy to point at to justify the project's existence. I think Dart and Flutter are very overlooked. The language has completely changed since its release, its statically typed, has null safety, enums, and pattern matching, and is very simple and easy to read. It has fast compilation and a ui framework with hot reload. It's as fast as Js on v8 while using less memory and has the overlooked feature of having very fast, almost 0 overhead, ffi. I think the importance of good ffi is underrated for these ui languages. For reference, everyone that's using electron has to run two node processes doing ipc over a websocket connection. That's going to waste an absurd number of cpu cycles and memory when you are passing messages around when your app is basically a ui for a cli.
- cageface 2mo agoI’ve had good experiences with Flutter too. It’s actually much easier to build a performant macOS app with flutter than with SwiftUI.
- wiseowise 2mo ago> It’s actually much easier to build a performant macOS app with flutter than with SwiftUI. Got any case studies?
- formvoltron 2mo agoCurious how you feel about KMP and Kotlin Compose.
- gman83 2mo agoI guess because they have buy-in from within Google? Google Pay, NotebookLM, Family Link, Google One, etc. are made with Flutter.
- deepsun 2mo agoMost Google's projects that users loved were axed for a reason, typically internal management wars for promotions. Like YouTube really wanted to kill belowed Google Music, so they did. Or Google Pay vs Google Wallet. Killing Flutter would not promote a manager. For now, of course.
- gumby271 2mo agoHow are they limping? Flutter has completely replaced it's rendering engine across all platforms and they're building out major window management support on desktop platforms. At some point there's just not much exciting new stuff to add. Flutter is a nice stable platform, I'd highly recommend it.
- matchbok3 2mo agoRight, but, nobody uses it. So what's the point for Google?
- gkhartman 2mo agoIs that true though? I'm reading HN on an app built using Flutter. I had no idea until recently, so I would assume more apps could use it without my knowledge. I understand it's limitations vs native apps, but there's quite a few cases where it really doesn't matter. The biggest one for me is always the fear it will be abandoned. Pretty much goes for any cross platform app framework though.
- monocasa 2mo agoGoogle AdSense uses it.
- vips7L 2mo agoThe creator of flutter was on here saying that 1/3 of all apps on the App Store use it. That seems to be a lot more than “nobody”.
- owebmaster 2mo ago[flagged]
- vips7L 2mo agoHow do you know? Why are we inclined to believe you over him?
- Scene_Cast2 2mo agoIn one of their dev surveys, they did float the idea of divesting Flutter.
- jauntywundrkind 2mo agoFlutter's not a web ecosystem project. It doesn't do HTML at all. Using canvas to pump pixels in people's faces does not the web make.
- defo10 2mo agoPeople don't get how important it is to have control over the basically the whole programming ecosystem of a particular language. Google services dominate Flutter. Look at all the services Google provides. You'll find first class support in Flutter. Compare that to AWS, Azure, etc and these usually have wip features or simple adapters. So if you like and use flutter/dart, for whatever reason really, chances are you'll use any of Google's services because their integration into the framework is much better, and the libraries are better maintained. I am convinced they did some proper analysis in-house and continuously find that investing the flutter/dart yields returns across all other services. The language/platform is the gateway.
- Aldo_MX 2mo agoDecoupling material and cupertino makes a lot of sense.
- gman83 2mo agoYes, hopefully now that this decoupling is complete, they'll actually start being updated again. The progress was a bit stalled while this process was ongoing.
- imadeanaccountj 2mo ago[flagged]
- sneurlax 2mo agoI care :)
- imadeanaccountj 2mo ago[flagged]
- kumarvvr 2mo agoThe one thing I hate about flutter is the ui code having an ungodly amount of nested brackets.
- eddythompson80 2mo agoYou clearly need more Lispmaxxing
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- superze 2mo ago[flagged]
- cocoa19 2mo agoDidn't realize it until now, but you're right. LOC is dead, long live token usage.
- skeledrew 2mo agoFor some reason I prefer those to curlies.
- MrDresden 2mo agoWhile you aren't wrong, in my experience when the amount of nesting starts giving me bad vibes it usually indicates that something can be refactored out as a standalone widget. Still, Flutter now feels ancient to use compared to something like Compose, in that regard.
- gman83 2mo agoI treat nesting as a feature: if the nesting starts getting deep, that's the code indicating to extract a child widget. It pushes me toward better composition and smaller, reusable components instead of giant monolithic views.
- Scene_Cast2 2mo agoAwesome. I'd love if Flutter could also finally get Impeller on Web (I'm tracking the GitHub issues, seems like there's progress at least). I personally would like for it to pick up some ideas from Svelte.
- Humphrey 2mo agoOh finally multi-window support - I might finally be able to flutter for a simple desktop app side project I've been wanting to build.
- synergy20 2mo agogreat for mobile apps, fine for desktops, basically unusable for browsers unless you do wasm, if web can be revamped/improved it can be the best option for cross platform GUI
- tonyhart7 2mo agono one and absolutely no one pick flutter because they want do traditional web in the first place its a cross platform framework that you can share component between mobile and other platform and always has been
- 999900000999 2mo agoI’ve used flutter for a couple of toy web apps. One is just a personal tool , another is a small party game. Now I might vibe code such things using React, but 5 , 6 years ago Flutter got me what I wanted fast. Firebase integration is absurdly easy. You can make a crud app in about 30 minutes
- tonyhart7 2mo agoYes but its best work with SPA or WASM type of app like games for example
- 999900000999 2mo agoIt's probably not the best for anything in particular. It's the fastest way to build something if you're not a big html person. I've never particularly been good at hmtl tbh. The older I get, the more I'm concerned with the ease of tools/frameworks vs what's the most optimal.
- tonyhart7 2mo agoits good at mobile, developer experience simply just better compared to java,kotlin xml UI declaration back then
- doodlesdev 2mo agoWhile I've used Flutter since Alpha, I've been away for a few years. A few things have shocked me in these release notes: how come Impeller still wasn't the default engine for all platforms? Also, why are they migrating to WASM if one of the core features of Dart is compiling to JavaScript? Finally, how come multi window support only get viable now, after four years having desktop support? Honestly, Flutter is an extremely enjoyable development experience I would recommend anyone I care for to stay away from. The fact it's developed by Google doesn't help: it's a matter of time before they kill it like they did with so many UI libraries and frameworks already, specially with JetBrains developing Compose Multiplatform and the Android team going all-in in the Compose strategy.
- skybrian 2mo agoI suppose AI would help for porting your app if you need to? It's not like the old days.
- ls-a 2mo ago[flagged]
- palata 2mo agoUnless it is a trivial app, it would still require quite some effort to port (and test), which has a cost. What do you gain by using Flutter that compensates for that risk?
- satvikpendem 2mo agoWorking on all devices with minimal effort. That's what I use it for anyway, anything else like a sound null safe language with Dart are just a bonus.
- maxloh 2mo agoFlutter operates more like a 2D game engine. It renders its own views, which involves a lot of arithmetic operations, making WASM a more efficient option than JS.
- skeledrew 2mo agoBeen waiting especially for multi-window so it can be picked up by Flet.
- theanonymousone 2mo agoAre you using Flet? If yes do you think it's mature enough and has a potential to stay long "in the game"?
- skeledrew 2mo agoI use Flet in a few projects. It's still somewhat young and the declarative move caused a few issues (for me, mainly because I wasn't familiar with the pattern), but generally I'd say it's stable, feature-complete and the maintainer seems to be in it for the long haul. Also it fills a critical gap that nothing else does, binding a decent UI framework and cross-platform capability to a language with an extremely large and diverse ecosystem; that's what I think will really make it endure.
- theanonymousone 2mo agoThanks. And do you know what it has to do with Flutter these days actually? There is barely any mention of Flutter in the website etc :/
- skeledrew 2mo agoFlutter is still the UI provider. It's even more tightly integrated now as the Python interpreter is embedded in Flutter as of v0.86. https://flet.dev/blog/flet-v-0-86-release-announcement https://flet.dev/blog/flet-v-0-86-release-announcement
- amazingamazing 2mo agoI always find it strange that flutter isn’t built with golang or typescript. Why use a new language? When flutter came out both languages existed so curious about that. The main reason i can think of is generics not existing initially
- bbkane 2mo agoI'm not sure why you're being downvoted, it's a super reasonable question. Iirc the reason is that the Dart team was willing to heavily modify the language and runtime to accommodate the needs of Flutter and the V8 team wasn't. I think this is the video that talks about this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xqGAC5QCYuQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xqGAC5QCYuQ
- billynomates 2mo agoDart shipped in 2011, four years before Flutter started. On the technical side, Flutter needed AOT compilation to native ARM for release builds and a JIT for development (that's what makes stateful hot reload possible). Dart does both from one codebase. TypeScript means shipping a JS VM, which is precisely the overhead Flutter was designed to avoid. (In contrast to RN). Dart's other big win is GC tuned for allocating and throwing away tons of short-lived objects which is what happens when you hot reload over and over. Go has no JIT, so no hot reload, and no generics until 2022, Flutter has a big widget library so that would not have been possible. And of course the Dart team was inside Google, and had just lost its original mission when Chrome declined to ship the Dart VM, and was willing to change the language to suit Flutter.
- esprehn 2mo agoThere were a lot of factors that led to the dart decision. It's also important to note that Flutter is very old, we were designing it in 2014. - we wanted hot reload - it was supposed to feel familiar to web developers and reasonable to native developers - iOS needed AOT compilation for speed since we couldn't use a JIT - TypeScript had literally just reached 1.0 - Swift looked promising, but the Oracle lawsuit made the idea of using it tenuous - Kotlin was not even 1.0 yet, that wouldn't happen for 2 more years - Go made huge binaries. The language was also lacking features like generics and Go was unwilling to add them (remember this is 2014). - v8 was not interested in AOT, but Dart was willing to dramatically invest in flutter There were probably other reasons too I'm forgetting. Dart was a really pragmatic choice to ship quickly. I have mixed feels about how the decision has aged over time, and wish we had things like Hermes and WASM back then, and a willingness to build a TypeScript compiler like other native frameworks (ex. Valdi)... But for the time I think the choice was reasonable.
- songhonglei1985 2mo ago[dead]
- sunsetSamurai 2mo agohow's Dart for back end development? is anybody using it to build APIs? the syntax doesn't look too bad
- wstrange 2mo agoTry out serverpod. Not affiliated with them- it's just a super nice integrated Dart backend: https://serverpod.dev/ https://serverpod.dev/
- sgt 2mo agoI've been using Dart and Flutter for years, but I've never ever met anyone who's seriously using Dart for backend. That would be a very niche thing and not popular with teams.
- flexagoon 2mo agoI have user Dart for small personal projects and it's a great language. Somewhat similar to Kotlin, but IMO a bit nicer. Unfortunately the ecosystem is not as developed outside of Flutter as with more popular languages, but it very much exists and pretty nice to use.
- 0rzech 2mo agoWhile the server side is still growing and obviously not as huge as Java etc., Dart definitely is being used on the backend. For instance, https://pub.dev/ https://pub.dev/ itself is written in Dart: https://github.com/dart-lang/pub-dev https://github.com/dart-lang/pub-dev . :) The language, like any other, does have some weaker parts, but in general is _very_ nice to write in - thanks to both the language itself and the toolchain built around it. The apps compile to native binaries for production and are run in Dart VM during development. The SDK is multi purpose. You can write "scripts", you can write CLI apps, servers and with Flutter - the rest of them.
- brabel 2mo agoFor production you may consider using dart VM also since it benefits from AOT and can actually be faster than a binary after it gets hot, similar to Java.
- wiseowise 2mo ago> We are actively working toward enabling WebAssembly (Wasm) by default for Flutter web applications, bringing native-like performance to the browser. lol.
- hirvi74 2mo agoI've never used Kotlin, but I really enjoy Flutter. Not nearly as much as SwiftUI and the Lord's language, mind you. Flutter can get you up and running quickly. If I want cross-plaform support, one codebase is hard to beat.
- feverzsj 2mo agoTested lots of flutter desktop apps on Github last year. All have sluggish animation. FPS rarely reached 60.
- thelollies 2mo agoI do more mobile/web Flutter dev so haven't got experience here but I'm surprised to hear that. Can you name some examples?
- britannio 2mo agoDebug mode?
- TheChaplain 2mo agoAre Flutter and React Native still viable choices today? I get the impression that more are going for native mobile, KMP or PWA.
- keyle 2mo agoWe use flutter at work. When you need to target various platforms for the same code base it's extremely competent.
- WA 2mo agoFlutter: if you want a pixel perfect version of your app that looks similar on Android and iOS. Some quite popular apps use it and make a shit ton of money, for example Headspace. More here: https://flutterhunt.com/ https://flutterhunt.com/ React Native: totally viable, because core business logic is the same. If you want native UI elements and all the iOS Liquid Glass stuff, but don’t want to have to completely separate code based, React Native is a viable option if you don’t mind installing lots of third party packages for functionality you get out of the box in Flutter or true native apps. Native mobile: I have one smaller app with quite a custom calendar view, written with Claude Code natively for Android and iOS. Coding agents help and you get maximum control. Mentally, it’s a bit cumbersome to direct you agent to do everything twice. While one platform can serve as a reference implementation for the other, it’s kinda annoying mentally "to do the same feature all over again and test and direct the agent". But it’s doable. KMP: No experience, I just hate most things around Android. PWA: That ship has sailed. Nobody knows about PWAs, most PWAs are bad. It’s a bummer really. Capacitor: make an SPA (offline-first preferably), and use native code plugins via Capacitor. Still quite feasible, comparable to Flutter in the sense that you need to build a custom UI or use a fake version of Liquid Glass and Material. I use Ionic for that, but it’s a bit dated (still on Material v2). Heavily depends on your skills as a web dev to get good UX.
- sgt 2mo agoNative was always the best. It was just time consuming, requiring a bigger team. Now with AI helping out, it's probably the best option by far. I still like Flutter a lot though because you can get stuff done fairly quickly and even apply Material design to the iOS apps or vice versa if you want to (if it's a business app where the design doesn't matter too much). Or if you e.g. target win32
- meerita 2mo agoI still prefer React Native with Expo over Flutter, mostly for practical reasons: * Language and hiring: TypeScript has a much larger developer pool. Dart is a solid language, but finding experienced Flutter engineers is harder. * Platform model: React Native maps much more naturally to native platform concepts. Flutter owns much more of the rendering stack, which is powerful, but also creates another abstraction layer between the app and the platform. * Performance: Flutter can absolutely be fast, so I would not claim otherwise. My experience, however, is that RN has required less work to get interactions and animations that feel consistently native. * Ecosystem: RN benefits from the broader React, TypeScript, JavaScript, and native ecosystems. Expo has also improved dramatically and now covers a large part of the usual mobile platform work. * Platform-specific features: neither framework completely eliminates native code. Things like widgets, Live Activities, Dynamic Island, extensions, NFC, and other platform APIs eventually bring you back to Swift/Kotlin anyway. * Migration to native: if the long-term destination is Swift and Kotlin, I find RN a better intermediate representation. Its component model and platform integration are closer to native concepts, which also makes the codebase easier for agents to translate incrementally into proper native applications. That said, these are trade-offs, not claims that Flutter is bad. Flutter has improved a lot, and for teams that want a highly consistent cross-platform UI, its rendering model can be an advantage.
- palata 2mo agoOut of curiosity, do you have any experience with Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform? I would like to know how that compares.
- meerita 2mo ago[dead]
- satvikpendem 2mo agoI have. It's still immature compared to Flutter and doesn't necessarily run native compiled code depending on platform, it can still be tied to the JVM. Not to mention how amazing pub is compared to Gradle.
- 2mo ago
- oDot 2mo agoDoes anyone know if the original promise of their simple layout model proved itself? IIRC, the Flutter team mentioned how using just width/height constraints is enough to represent all relevant layouts. This sounds very nice, being so much simpler than Flexbox and miles ahead of CSS Grid ergonomics. Did it live up to the promise or did they expand the model with Flex/Grid/etc?
- gman83 2mo agoThe premise is a bit off. Flutter was never just width/height: the model is min/max box constraints. The core rule is: constraints go down, sizes come up, parent sets position. Row and Column are just layout algorithms built on that same model, not separate engines added later. GridView uses the sliver system internally, but still doesn't require anything like CSS Grid's general layout model. The render API is open enough for custom layouts too, so packages like https://pub.dev/packages/boxy https://pub.dev/packages/boxy build directly on it
- phoghed 2mo agoThe web almost got constraint based layout. Well maybe almost is too strong, but it was a candidate. CCSS. We got tables and floats instead.
- faangguyindia 2mo agoIt's much easier to fix flutter layout issues than CSS on web in my experience.
- eviks 2mo ago> Linux and Windows now support popup windows, allowing you to build native context menus and utility palettes. How does such a basic feature only get added so late?
- AbuAssar 2mo agoflutter started as a mobile framework, and mobiles didn't support multi windows back then
- eviks 2mo agoThis doesn't help, desktop support was added 5 years ago, so that's longer than the age of flutter before that
- mixmastamyk 2mo agoMost of the team was laid off a few years ago.
- 0rzech 2mo agoThis is not true on many levels: * Most of the team stayed at the company. * The layoffs hit mostly DevOps and infra people in Flutter team. * At least part of the laid off roles were moved offshore to Germany, India etc.
- AbuAssar 2mo agothe "Text and selection" demo caught my attention, why flutter render the shortcuts bar itself and not delegate this to the underlaying os?
- ouz-a 2mo agoFlutter is good on its own but dev tooling and long compile times kills all the enjoyment.
- brabel 2mo agoWith full hot reload support I am curious how compile times can be an issue.
- junaid1460 2mo agoI just moved out last month, it's just pain after sometime now, it's okay and good for mobile cross, when it comes to desktop, I'd have to struggle to support linux with quick hangs
- kebsup 2mo agoIf anyone is interested to see the WASM + canvas renderer performance compared to Android/iOS builds, I've build my app for the web. The web app is here: https://app.vocabuo.com https://app.vocabuo.com (completely free) And the links for Android/iOS builds are here: https://vocabuo.com https://vocabuo.com (soft paywall) To an untrained eye who does not care about dropping a few frames, the web version is almost indistinguishable from the "native" build. Especially if you add it to homescreen from safari to hide the navigation bar.
- merrvk 2mo agoNeed to let this project die and invest the manpower + experience into something useful.
- hactually 2mo agoThe android ecosystem is pretty useful...
- faangguyindia 2mo agoI vouch for Flutter over React Native; we built https://macrocodex.app/ https://macrocodex.app/ with 16,000+ users already! And it's completely free no ads, no subscriptions, or donations, for the public benefit of improving health and fitness. It's a guaranteed weight loss or gain app; results within 2-5 weeks! Don't believe? well just read reviews. We do not have Revenue, so no money to spend on marketing. OK so that's brief description of what we built now flutter part: The Flutter development experience is very smooth; you rarely run into any issues, just be careful not to block the UI isolate. Sometimes bad structuring issues or ui bugs may end up blocking your UI. My experience is in Backend (java, rust, c++, go, ruby, python etc..) and this is the first time i built a mobile app. And same is true for other guys on the team. Some limitations are from the underlying platform and not Flutter. Initially, I thought the lack of OTA was a dealbreaker (as App Store / Play Store approvals are a slow loop) and Expo might be better, but the lack of OTA made me structure the app differently and it turned out it's not as big of a deal actually. We also managed to have a PWA app (for nearly free) by using Flutter web, so it also runs on devices which do not support the Play Store or App Store, giving us max coverage across the board. We tested react native but found it slow (your code runs in Hermes VM so you need to write native code to offload) and dev tools aren't as good as flutters imho. Dart AOT, which is what runs on iOS/Android, is much faster by default, so you'll hardly ever feel any need to write native code. And when you do need to write native code, we use some for WorkManager and HealthConnect it's very easy! Just be careful with R8; you might have to set rules (though most plugins ship with rules these days) but if you are writing native code in java/kotlin you may have to do this on your own, or it can sometimes break things! I am glad I picked Flutter over React Native! I had my doubts, but I am glad I looked at their "architecture" rather than the hype of the subreddits.
- phoghed 2mo agoI wanted to love flutter. It’s just so hard to commit to anything like this Google makes without a full expectation of getting rug pulled.
- faangguyindia 2mo agoI think they are planning to offload it to an open-source foundation! I remember having received a questionnaire along those lines!
- BiteCode_dev 2mo agoVery happy that it's still maintain, because that's the only real framework that allow an easy dev for a decently fast app with one code base that works on linux, windows, mac, ios and android at once. It's super nice.
- iririririr 2mo agoflutter should 100% drop web target. if you disagree you never used flutter for real, or are lying to yourself while employed by google to work on flutter
- peterspath 2mo agoIs it still that stupid nesting of widgets? Example: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_e53f2ba6-cac3-49e4-ab95-c931c07452e6 https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_e53f2ba6-cac3-49e4-ab95-c9...