build VS plugins

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).

(This new version will be endorsed by google_sign_in: ^6.0.0, once this PR lands: https://github.com/flutter/plugins/pull/7191, probably next week. This was made a major version change so people can test and update at their own pace.)

Looking at the web version of the video player package which doesn't use textures but VideoElement DOM nodes, I'd guess that textures aren't supported.

It's not 100% true that Flutter doesn't offer any first party native features. These plugins are maintained by the Flutter team: https://github.com/flutter/plugins/tree/main/packages

Here's an example: https://github.com/flutter/plugins. As you can see, that repo has no "issues" tab. And it mentions that issues should be created on the Flutter repo itself

There's work in progress to create a new camera plugin using CameraX: https://github.com/flutter/plugins/pull/6158

Find the example wiring in the Google sign-in example application.

image_picker

shared_preferences

The plugins is missing Issues tab currently. It's hard for developers who need to raise or find issues on packages.