dart_style VS Flutter

> Oh I'm curious why you're rewriting it?

The primary driver is that we're moving to a fairly different formatting style: https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/issues/1253

The formatter works sort of like a compiler in that it parses the code, translates it to an internal representation, does optimization on that IR, and then outputs final code. The main difference is that the "final code" is also source code, and the "optimization" is line splitting.

The old IR grew organically over time and got increasingly difficult to work with. It baked certain formatting choices directly into the IR (mainly indentation) which line splitting then had no control over. For example, given a function call like:

    someLongFunctionName(some + long + argument + expression, [firstElement, anotherElement, aThirdElement]);

in your analysis_options.yaml. The formatter doesn't understand the new syntax yet, though.

Sorry, perhaps im not quite familiar with the GitHub issues you’re chatting about, but a quick search shows the Dart team actually made a very similar argument about laptops and diffs as the first reply in a thread about the 80 character max: https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/issues/833

Nope, but there is a proposal to set line length in pubspec.yaml: https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/issues/918

The standard Dart extension only supports formatting using the SDK-supplied formatter (dart_style) which (by design) is not configurable (although it can be turned on/off with the dart.enableSdkFormatter setting).

Flutter itself provides formatting choices, however, it only formats Dart files and it doesn’t re-order the code. Flutter formats the code based on these formatting rules.

There are some other possibilities - such as complex code being slow to format (for example I hit https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/issues/1022 and originally thought it was a repro for this issue), or that the server is busy doing its initial synchronous scan of the workspace, though those should be temporary and the format should eventually complete so it's probably not what most people are reporting here.

[3]: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/tree/master/packages/flut...

Thanks - that link does not appear to be open access, anyways I don't think I've seen it. I'm familiar with Flutter at a high-level (Kevin Moore gave a great talk on it at Wasm I/O), and I think other than requiring users to work in Dart, it is probably one of the most powerful ways to do cross-platform UI today.

Worth noting that their original GPU backend was Skia, and now they are retooling around Flutter GPU (Impeller)[0], which is kind of designed similarly as an abstract rendering interface over platform-specific GPU APIs.

[0]https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Flutter-GPU

If you are considering Electron/React then I would suggest adding Flutter to your list of technologies to consider. It uses Dart (a language similar to C#) and has a lot going for it… relatively quick to get up to speed with, fantastic developer experience (e.g., hot reload, great IDE support, good development tools) and very strong cross-platform support: it generates native iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows and Linux executables. Check it out: https://flutter.dev/

You can find the React Native documentation here and Flutter Documentation here.

[1]https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/55092#issuecomment...

> There is actually a great issue thread on the Flutter GitHub that explains exactly why other solutions do not work correctly when compared to hooks [0]

Interesting. I assume you are referring to this comment in particular -> https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/51752#issuecomment... ?