flutter-elinux VS flutter-embedded-linux

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.

You can just write a swift wrapper over FlutterDesktopMessenger but you'll also need to write message codec implementation in swift.

I'm curious which operating systems people are still waiting for. We have delivered Windows, macOS and Linux on stable as of Flutter 3. We don't have plans to add more, but people in the community are working on things like embedded Linux: https://github.com/sony/flutter-embedded-linux

Disclosure: I'm a Developer Relations Engineer for Flutter

Oh that sucks. Yeah Qt has gotten really aggressive with their licensing headaches. They broke so many of our CI scripts when they made it mandatory for you to log in to use their Qt installer even for online version.

And yep. Relying on just Google can be a death sentence. I was hoping to use Android things for a quick demo last month only to find out that it is discontinued. What made me look at flutter was because companies like Sony are driving forward it's development on embedded space ( https://github.com/sony/flutter-embedded-linux ). Tbh I am still looking for something that was as nice as QtQuick on embedded devices, but with a permissive license.

So other than electron, what options do you see moving forward? All i see is slint ( https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/ ).

In no particular order:

- The type system was essentially like java but perhaps even worse -- in a world with Rust, Haskell, Julia, Kotlin, Scala, and even Golang this seemed egregious. No algebraic data types, inheritance, nullable values, lack of errors-as-values approach. I know they worked hard on the language, but it's like they ignored all the progress in PL over the last like decade+.

- JSON serialization/deserialization[1] was like the worst parts of Go and the worst parts of Java (again this has to

- SQLite driver[0] couldn't be used off device. I found this out while trying to write tests that ran off-device. Now there's sqlite3[1] so maybe it's no longer an issue

- Dart2 was a played down rewrite of Dart1, with JS interop removed. Typescript is a better language than Dart.

- BloC is overcomplicated and was rolled out poorly at the time (this has more to do with Flutter than Dart). The state management patterns felt like unbaked react (flux pattern) v1.

All this said, Dart will probably be around for a very long time. Fuschia makes a LOT of sense for Google to continue pursuing, which uses Flutter. Dart could be worse, and I think it's good enough for a bunch of usecases. If it were me, I wouldn't even choose it over Nativescript.

The Boring Flutter Development Show[3] was/is fantastic, I watched it religiously when I was learning and trying out Flutter -- having a big backer like google means there are always going to be dedicated resources and smart people behind Flutter which honestly probably matters more in the long run than Dart being a shit language. As Golang has shown us, you can just iterate to having a good language.

Seeing Sony embrace flutter for embedded things is pretty big as well[4]. Sony has a surprisingly strong track record of making technologically competent products:

- PS Vita (generally regarded as ahead of it's time)

- Sony SmartWatch 1 & 2 (I owned both, they were ahead of their time, and were very good quality, easily hackable)

- Sony XPeria phones & tablets (embraced open source and easy bootloader unlock, I own a tablet that I'm extremely happy with)

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

[1]: https://pub.dev/packages/json_serializable

[2]: https://pub.dev/packages/sqlite3

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXAUNLWdTcw&list=PLjxrf2q8ro...

[4]: https://github.com/sony/flutter-embedded-linux