language VS tests

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.

If your code is open source, you can submit your tests to the https://github.com/flutter/tests repo and we guarantee we will fix your code if we would otherwise have broken you. I strongly encourage people to make use of this. I had a project that I stopped working on for like two years and the entire time it kept working fine because it was in that repo. (I've since abandoned that project but I'll definitely be using this option for future projects.) If you're a big company with thousands of tests we can also find ways to integrate those (Google for example has all its internal tests running this way so we end up fixing anything we would break in Google), reach out to me on our Discord (see the contributing guide for the link) if you're interested in making use of this.

See my other answer for more details, but in general I encourage you to use our tests registry (https://github.com/flutter/tests). We guarantee we will not break code that has been submitted there.

If you contribute tests to flutter/tests we guarantee that we won't break them. See https://github.com/flutter/tests/ for details!