flutter-elinux VS ffigen

Flutter, for sure. It feels like a much more thoughtful system overall. I'm not as impressed with the Dart ecosystem as I am with the Flutter one, mostly because the Dart ecosystem lacks widely used/supported frameworks for server-side development. I would LOVE to completely remove Javascript from my life and if there were a solid server-side framework for Dart, I could use it literally everywhere.

Re your problems:

1. Yeah, break widgets down. Yes, it's more work, but it's necessary in the same way that breaking code down into smaller functions is necessary. You don't just cram everything into one file and you shouldn't expect that a mega-widget will be the right way either.

2. Flutter for web is still very early on. You should know that there are two renderers (one that uses canvas and one that uses real dom elements), but they're both just "okay" at this point. They have been rapidly improving however -- the difference between now and this time last year is significant. It'll keep getting better and in the mean time, it's usable enough. The download sizes are huge and sometimes rendering can be a little janky, but again: it'll get better. For me, the promise of a unified system for desktop, web, mobile, and even some limited 3rd party embedded Linux support (https://github.com/sony/flutter-elinux) is really appealing.

Things have improved though last time I checked 4 years ago. Flutter UI kit is definitely more complete and not fragmented as RN UI kits, or even React UI kits. On top of that you have official:

- firebase

- supabase

- revenue cat

- stripe

- google maps

- google ads / analytics

- grpc

- webview

- tensorflow

just to name a few - there is even more community one e.g: lottie, mobx, just_audio etc.

interop seems also improved:

cffi got improved and been out of beta for a while and they also added FFIgen [0] that can generate bindings to C and Rust C

rust flutter bridge [1] - even though not official is very popular and well maintained. So you can use vast cross-platform crates if you need something more advanced and low latency like for Audio you have CPAL

[0] https://pub.dev/packages/ffigen

[1] https://github.com/fzyzcjy/flutter_rust_bridge

There's ffigen, which can be used to generate code that talks to the C API.

ffigen

This new mechanism utilizes the fact that Objective-C and Swift code can be exposed as C code based on API bindings. The Dart API wrapper generation tool, ffigen, can create these bindings from API headers.