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vmg12 11 hours 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.

Larrikin 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But 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.

wiseowise 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Only because it was cheaper to migrate Android to Kotlin instead of Dart. JetBrains needs Google more than Google needs JetBrains.

pjmlp 6 hours ago | parent [-]

There 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.

invalidname 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You'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.

veeti 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Android used to be its own kingdom separate from rest of Google. And maybe still is.

10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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cageface 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’ve had good experiences with Flutter too. It’s actually much easier to build a performant macOS app with flutter than with SwiftUI.

wiseowise 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> It’s actually much easier to build a performant macOS app with flutter than with SwiftUI.

Got any case studies?

cageface 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Just my own apps. Getting good performance out of SwiftUI on Mac is quite difficult. Loads of footguns.

mathverse 4 hours ago | parent [-]

And yet I dont see any Flutter macos apps at all.

formvoltron 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Curious how you feel about KMP and Kotlin Compose.

vmg12 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I 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.