flutter_embedder VS engine

I'm actually working on this as a side project (here).

I personally settled on Flutter. It's a modern declarative UI framework by Google that was designed for mobile apps, but it can also do desktop and web these days. It can be used as a library using its embedder API that can render to Vulkan, Metal and OpenGL. So, it can be embedded in a wgpu context (here's my prototype for that based on wgpu/Vulkan and winit). Flutter uses Dart for UI programming, which is fine for me, since a lot of iteration is necessary for that, and Flutter allows Dart code to be hot reloaded during development (so you just have to save your file and the running application is updated automatically, keeping all of its state intact). Rust wouldn't be able to do that at the moment. Web support is trivial, because Flutter Web allows integrating HTML elements between its UI layers. I can simply insert a canvas there and link that to wgpu.

Here's the repository.

I've started writing my own Flutter shell here that runs on all desktop and mobile systems Flutter supports without any platform-specific code paths. The trick is that I'm delegating the responsibility for platform-specific code to a generic library (winit in this case) and so keep it out of my codebase.

I've started a project for using Rust for a shell using the Flutter Engine's embedder interface, so it’s trivial to integrate Rust into the system. It’s available here.

What I'm currently looking into is using Flutter for UI drawing instead of web tech. It has a built-in compositing API that allows interleaving native drawing with its surfaces and has a Vulkan renderer. The only downside is that you have to write a shell for it that maps the native platform to its APIs, which is very underdocumented and needs a lot of code, for example for handling keyboard input. Here's my progress so far. It comes with shells for all of its supported platforms, but they all use OpenGL or Metal (for iOS/macOS).

I need to check out how well this combines with my Rust-based Flutter shell.

I personally spent a significant part of my spare time in the last few months researching this topic, and came to the conclusion that for my (very similar) project, I'd like to use Flutter and Dart for the UI and Rust with wgpu (maybe bevy) for the rendering backend. I'm working on an integration for native platforms (so everything except web) right now, it's available in earliest alpha here. Web itself is trivial, because you can simply mount a separate canvas as a platformview and use that for wgpu, completely separating the two worlds.

Unfortunately, I'm really busy these days so I don't have any time for any more projects. I'm currently working on this project, which allows using the UI framework Flutter together with wgpu, so I'd say that it's adjacent to your project.

https://github.com/flutter/engine/blob/main/impeller/docs/fa...

Impeller is the Skia replacement and is in full c++ that supports all platform.

It will be great if Go team can work with them(both are in Google) and make Impeller a render engine for Go.

With this no more bloated electron.js and no more Java/Swing or Qt, what a dream for the day.

Likely it's https://github.com/flutter/engine/pull/41168 that fixed it, which got cherry picked into that commit.

Depends on what you want to do. The best documentation for writing the code where the engine should run in is in this header file.

Performance on large-screen and also high-refresh rate iPads was definitely a blind spot during the preview. We've done a ton of work to plug that gap since the preview though. Framebuffer fetch for advanced blends, improvement to blur performance, and using half-precision in performance critical shaders are just some of the improvements driven by these findings.

Yes. We use ATK for accessibility. FlAccessibleNode is where SemanticsNode and friends are exposed as ATK objects.

The hardware accelerated 3D that was demoed was using Impeller Scene. Considering they were loading glb files I really hope the Flutter API has a GLES interface. It's currently marked "Experimental" and the demo they showed unfortunately doesn't have source in the same place as the other demos presented.

For example for the last point, embed Flutter in HTML pages, an important PR is recently merged: https://github.com/flutter/engine/pull/37738