build VS timecop

I agree, Dart's public-facing codegen system (build_runner) leaves a lot to be desired. (In part the problem is that Dart uses a separate system inside Google.)

However, this is a topic of active work for the Dart team: https://github.com/dart-lang/build/issues/3800. I'm sure they would welcome your feedback, particularly if you have examples you can share.

You're also always welcome to reach out to me if you have Flutter/Dart concerns. I founded the Flutter project (and briefly led the Dart team) and care a great deal about customer success with both. [email protected] reaches me.

The official documentation is here. It's not very beginner friendly. Therefore, it might be easier to look at the examples.

In the first part of this series of posts, we discussed how Flutter and -Dart in general- makes use of builders to generate source code during the build process.

build: "Defines the basic pieces of how a build happens and how they interact."

build_runner

Having spent about 6 months each with SwiftUI and Flutter I vastly prefer working with Flutter. Swift is a far more ambitious language but really doesn't live up to it's own marketing. Many of the features are half down (generics and protocols are both full of holes). Dart on the other hand doesn't have half as many nice features but the one's that are there are rock solid. Reified generics in particular is far nicer to work with (Swift's compiler gets regularly gets lost on type resolution and then doesn't give you any way to give it hints). Dart also seems to be heading in the right direction. It's added null safety and the upcoming metaprogramming features should fill in many of the gaps that are currently filled by the very practical but clunky https://pub.dev/packages/build.

I am one of the authors of the build package (https://github.com/dart-lang/build) which does effectively expose a plugin system. We take the approach of creating a wrapper script that actually just generates the real program (adds imports to the plugins, registers them, etc) and then it just runs that program. There are several downsides to this approach though (primarily, slow startup).

20. TimeCop

I unfortunately didn't keep great records at the time (probably because I was so pissed off), but my app [1] has gone through some dependency hell on more than one occasion. I've more or less stepped back from the project but the thing that sticks out to me the most is when I left the project for several months, then tried to re-clone and re-build the app to fix a bug. I ended up having to change at least a few depenencies and even send in an upstream PR to get things working (thankfully accepted quickly) before I could compile because something had somehow changed in those few months. Fixing it took a couple days of effort, which for a toy side-project almost killed it on the spot.

In my experience, Flutter is the worst cross-platform mobile development tool; except for all the others.

[1] Time Cop: https://github.com/hamaluik/timecop

Time Cop - A time tracking app that respects your privacy by Kenton Hamaluik.