flutter-embedded-linux VS ui-mock

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

It's quite possible to develop Rust for Windows without using Windows.

Try my open source "ui-mock".[1] This is a test of the cross-platform stack. Just get the repository with "git clone", and make sure you have Rust installed for target "x86_64-pc-windows-gnu". See the Cargo.toml file for build instructions.

This is a game-type user interface. It's just some menus and a 3D cube. It doesn't do much, but it exercises all the lower levels. This allows debugging cross-platform problems in a simple environment. The main crates used are winit (cross-plaform window event handling), wgpu (cross-plaform GPU handling), rfd (cross-platform file dialogs), keychain (cross-platform password storage), egui (Rust-native menus and dialogs), and rend3 (safe interface to wgpu). For graphics, it uses Vulkan, so it will run on Windows back to the last release of Windows 7. Not Windows 95, though; it's 64-bit. It will also run under Wine, so you don't even need a Windows system to test.

My metaverse client uses the same stack. It's compiled on Linux, and runs on both Linux and Windows. So I'm building a high-performance 3D graphics program for Windows without even owning a Windows system or using any Microsoft software.

[1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/ui-mock

Profiling on the CPU side is well handled by tracy, which is a game-oriented profiler. My programs render-bench and ui-mock are prepped for Tracy, as is Rend3, so you can try it out on them.

ui-mock -- game GUI test fixture This exercises rfd->egui->rend3->wgpu. It's a game GUI with menus and dialogs, but no game behind it, just a 3D drawing of a cube. It's useful for making bugs in that stack repeatable. That's been helpful in wringing out obscure bugs in egui.

Egui works well with Rend3. Here's my example and library for that. It's a dummy game UI; no game, but brings up menus atop Rend3 3D. Egui is very low level. Each dialog takes a lot of code. Something to generate dialogs from some kind of template would be useful. I have many of those to do. Incidentally, does anyone have examples of good color themes for egui? The default is shades of black on black, which is a bit harsh. I'd like to see some examples where the aesthetics are better.

There's an attempt to make this work for Rust desktop applications. There's the winit crate, which does cross-platform windowing and event loops. There's egui, for menus and subwindows. There's rfd, for file dialogs, which are special for security reasons. And there's wgpu, for cross-platform 3D.

I'm using all of these in my ui-mock,[1] which is a GUI for a game without the game. It has 3D graphics with 2D GUI elements on top. I'm using this to shake down all the cross-platform problems for my metaverse client. My own code, which is 100% safe Rust, has no platform dependent code.

Results are pretty good. There's minor dirty laundry in those libraries, which has been reported to the various maintainers. Stuff like this:

- You can get a file dialog hidden behind the main window, which, in a full screen program, is a real problem. Mostly a Linux problem; works fine on Windows.

- Full screen on Windows mode under Wine 7 crashes Wine. Known Wine bug.

- Warnings from WGPU, but it works around all of them with some minor performance loss.

- Cross-platform packaging, to make a Windows installer without Windows, isn't implemented yet.

So, not big stuff. A lot of stuff works that you might not expect to work, such as profiling with tracy. Wgpu is taking care of Vulkan vs Apple's Metal. (Apple just had to Think Different, to the annoyance of everybody doing 3D.) Opening a web page in the default browser is cross-platform. You can cross-compile - I build the Windows version on Linux, without using any Microsoft tools.

With some more work, I could make this work on WASM and Android as well, but that requires some special casing, mostly because WASM doesn't have proper threads.

So cross-platform desktop development is working pretty well. Most of the problems I'm running into would not appear in a more typical application.

[1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/ui-mock

I have a Rend3/Egui/WGPU program, https://github.com/John-Nagle/ui-mock