gallery VS language

I was pessimistic about flutter 4 years ago but rechecked it recently (learning right now) and IMO it's really good user/developer proposition these days. They resolved most of issues on mobile devices and desktops - only web version still off but once wasmGC is ready (hopefully this year) probably things will improve.

Best way for developer elevator pitch just download few flutter apps and see how you like the experience:

1. wonderous - https://flutter.gskinner.com/wonderous/

2. flutterflow (low code + gui editor for flutter) - https://https://flutterflow.io/

3. appflowy (notion alternative) - https://appflowy.io/

4. flutter gallery (official flutter kitchen sink) -

Android (Google Play Store, .apk) - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.flutter.dem...

web (gallery.flutter.dev) - https://gallery.flutter.dev/

macOS (.zip) - https://github.com/flutter/gallery/releases/latest

5. official material 3.0 demo - https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/material_3_demo/#/

I recommend to checkout and play with material 3.0 demo (just keep in mind this is web version will have even better when using native compiled version on mobile or desktop):

https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/material_3_demo/#/

4) Try web flutter gallery to see numerous app samples (more complex) and widgets

https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/

again even better to download mobile or desktop version that there is in app store:

play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.flutter.dem...

macos dmg (.zip): https://github.com/flutter/gallery/releases/latest

I tried both macos flutter gallery and on iOS and surpassingly is pretty good these days and smooth and feel native - even text selection works these days, moving cursor with long press on keyboard space etc. Occasionally was more difficult to dismiss keyboard on iOS and back/next mouse keys or touchpad gestures didn't work on macOS flutter gallery. But overall I'm quite satisfied and surprised comparing how it looked 4 years ago.

I remember the first time when I looked at the Flutter Gallery and was surprised at how things felt just broken in a web browser, for example: https://gallery.flutter.dev (I think it was the Reply example in particular)

Ctrl + click or middle mouse button didn't work on links, right click didn't work, selecting and copying text didn't work, inspect element didn't work (due to how the technology is built), even attempting to zoom the page did nothing.

This article does ring true both because of that experience, as well as some of the SPA implementations I've seen even with more conventional technologies.

Google Docs. Figma. Any Flutter app like https://gallery.flutter.dev/. Short answer, they're really not handling accessibility.

Even when you did that, scrolling was completely wrong. The web simply doesn’t expose primitives from which you can build native-feel scrolling, and the best you can manage on precise touchpads (that is, all laptops now) will normally feel terrible, and lack things like inertia which are rather important. https://gallery.flutter.dev/, for example, scrolls less than half as fast as it should, and lacks inertia. (… and renders text in the wrong font, and doesn’t do links at all where it obviously should, and uses scrollbars that behave all wrong quite apart from being overlay which my native aren’t, and get typing emoji wrong, and… and… seriously, it’s just a litany of awfulness.)

Oh wow. I had thought the claim that they were not producing any semantic web elements was almost certainly exaggerated. That said, for the number of things that are on https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/reply, there are a surprisingly low number of elements. Wow.

example: https://gallery.flutter.dev (and Flutter Gallery on the playstore)

You could just need to clear your cache, but I suspect might have something going on because of how you're loading your theme. Not sure about having two runapp functions. I would suggest inspecting gallery.flutter.dev and then implementing a splash screen the way they have, as you will get the benefit of having a slash while flutter is being loaded, vs a splash screen that won't start until after, which imho, defeats the purpose.

I noticed that I can enable inline-class as an experiment to play with Extension Types. You need to also add sdk: ^3.3.0-0 to your pubspec.yaml.

Current syntax is not all that bad if you are going to do OO and add various helper methods on `Message` and its subclasses, but if you just want to define your data and no behavior / helpers - then it is exceedingly verbose.

[1]: https://github.com/dart-lang/language/issues/3021

Reference

A future version of Dart will probably support macros which should make this all a bit easier to use, similar to how Swift 5.9 works which makes already fantastic use of its new macro capabilities by integrating mobx (or solidjs) like reactivity into SwiftUI by a harmlessly looking @Obervable annotation.

Coming from a Dart context here where that team is also looking at adding Macros to the language. It was really interesting to compare and contrast some of the approaches https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/main/working/macr...

Yes, that needs a bit of boilerplate for the constructor declaration and the extra build method, but I personally don't mind and with implicit constructors this will become much easier. Also, you get a performant UI as Flutter knows to not redraw widgets that didn't change.

I know that it would be nice not to use the generator at all, but we have to wait until static metaprogramming is implemented in dart. https://github.com/dart-lang/language/issues/1482

I implemented a prototype version of the algorithm in that paper when exploring exhaustiveness checking for pattern matching in Dart.

I found it pretty easy to understand, but also really easy to get it to generate huge combinatorially large spaces. Some careful memoization and deduplication helped, but even so I never got the performance to a state I considered acceptable.

Instead, I went with Luc Maranget's classic approach and figured out a way to adapt it to a language with subtyping (with a ton of work from Johnni Winther to figure out all of the hard complex cases around generics):

https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/main/accepted/fut...

The performance (in the prototype!) was dramatically better. You can always make pattern matching go combinatorial, but I haven't seen any real-world switches get particularly slow with our approach yet, and we have some fairly large tests of matching on tuples of enums.