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Easy, 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 jus
by vmg12 1mo ago
Easy, 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 1mo 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 1mo ago> It’s actually much easier to build a performant macOS app with flutter than with SwiftUI. Got any case studies?
- formvoltron 1mo agoCurious how you feel about KMP and Kotlin Compose.
- vmg12 1mo agoI like kotlin a lot but I didn't get to fully test KMP and Kotlin Compose. I chose flutter because I liked dart's wasm story better than kotlins.
- Larrikin 1mo agoBut they also fund JetBrains, Jetpack Compose, and KMP. It feels like the company threw their support behind Kotlin a long while ago on mobile, but internal struggles keep the others limping along. Compose UI tooling no longer requires viewing on device.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- invalidname 1mo agoYou're thinking of Google as a single top down company. It isn't. Think of it as an anarchy of warlords where each pulls the strings and management doesn't really know what's going on. Flutter made a lot of sense during the Oracle lawsuit when Google needed a way to show Oracle that it can pivot from Java. Now it no longer makes sense but the inertia is too deep. My guess is that flutter is sold internally through the Huawei support as a leg within China.
- wiseowise 1mo agoOnly because it was cheaper to migrate Android to Kotlin instead of Dart. JetBrains needs Google more than Google needs JetBrains.
- pjmlp 1mo agoThere are several clues that the reasons were more political than monetary, including some former team members like Jake Warton remarks on Dart. Note that Dart or Flutter are nowhere to be found on Android developer documentation.
- brabel 1mo agoAt the time Google went with Kotlin, Flutter was still very new and a much bigger step away from Java given Kotlin already back then was seamlessly integrated with Java and compiled to JVM bytecode.
- veeti 1mo agoAndroid used to be its own kingdom separate from rest of Google. And maybe still is.