flutter_file_picker VS build

file_picker

The official documentation is here. It's not very beginner friendly. Therefore, it might be easier to look at the examples.

In the first part of this series of posts, we discussed how Flutter and -Dart in general- makes use of builders to generate source code during the build process.

build: "Defines the basic pieces of how a build happens and how they interact."

build_runner

Having spent about 6 months each with SwiftUI and Flutter I vastly prefer working with Flutter. Swift is a far more ambitious language but really doesn't live up to it's own marketing. Many of the features are half down (generics and protocols are both full of holes). Dart on the other hand doesn't have half as many nice features but the one's that are there are rock solid. Reified generics in particular is far nicer to work with (Swift's compiler gets regularly gets lost on type resolution and then doesn't give you any way to give it hints). Dart also seems to be heading in the right direction. It's added null safety and the upcoming metaprogramming features should fill in many of the gaps that are currently filled by the very practical but clunky https://pub.dev/packages/build.

I am one of the authors of the build package (https://github.com/dart-lang/build) which does effectively expose a plugin system. We take the approach of creating a wrapper script that actually just generates the real program (adds imports to the plugins, registers them, etc) and then it just runs that program. There are several downsides to this approach though (primarily, slow startup).