wander VS Flutter

very cool! if you're exploring wasm for graphics, take a look at Wander- lets you create and execute "renderlets" — portable modules containing graphics data and code compiled to wasm https://github.com/renderlet/wander

I used to work at Adobe on the infrastructure powering big applications like Photoshop and Acrobat. One of our worst headaches was making these really powerful codebases work on desktop, web, mobile, and the cloud without having to completely rewrite them. For example, to get Lightroom and Photoshop working on the web we took a winding path through JavaScript, Google’s PNaCl, asm.js, and finally WebAssembly, all while having to rethink our GPU architecture around these devices. We even had to get single-threaded builds working and rebuild the UI around Web Components. Today the web builds work great, but it was a decade-long journey to get there!

The graphics stack continues to be one of the biggest bottlenecks in portability. One day I realized that WebAssembly (Wasm) actually held the solution to the madness. It’s runnable anywhere, embeddable into anything, and performant enough for real-time graphics. So I quit my job and dove into the adventure of creating a portable, embeddable WASM-based graphics framework from the ground up: high-level enough for app developers to easily make whatever graphics they want, and low-level enough to take full advantage of the GPU and everything else needed for a high-performance application.

I call it Renderlet to emphasize the embeddable aspect — you can make self-contained graphics modules that do just what you want, connect them together, and make them run on anything or in anything with trivial interop.

If you think of how Unity made it easy for devs to build cross-platform games, the idea is to do the same thing for all visual applications.

Somewhere along the way I got into YC as a solo founder (!) but mostly I’ve been heads-down building this thing for the last 6 months. It’s not quite ready for an open alpha release, but it’s close - close enough that I’m ready to write about it, show it off, and start getting feedback. This is the thing I dreamed of as an application developer, and I want to know what you think!

When Rive open-sourced their 2D vector engine and made a splash on HN a couple weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39766893), I was intrigued. Rive’s renderer is built as a higher-level 2D API similar to SVG, whereas the Wander renderer (the open-source runtime part of Renderlet) exposes a lower-level 3D API over the GPU. Could Renderlet use its GPU backend to run the Rive Renderer library, enabling any 3D app to have a 2D vector backend? Yes it can - I implemented it!

You can see it working here: https://vimeo.com/929416955 and there’s a deep technical dive here: https://github.com/renderlet/wander/wiki/Using-renderlet-with-rive%E2%80%90renderer. The code for my runtime Wasm Renderer (a.k.a. Wander) is here: https://github.com/renderlet/wander.

I’ll come back and do a proper Show HN or Launch HN when the compiler is ready for anyone to use and I have the integration working on all platforms, but I hope this is interesting enough to take a look at now. I want to hear what you think of this!

Flutter

Dart/Flutter: I chose the Dart language and the Flutter framework because I already have experience with these technologies and was looking for a solution that would allow the creation of an app for both iOS and Android without needing to create two separate codes.

Before starting the tutorial on developing a personal target tracking application with Flutter, Riverpod, Strapi, and GraphQL, ensure you meet the following requirements:

[✓] Flutter (Channel stable, 3.19.2, on macOS 14.2.1 23C71 darwin-arm64, locale en-US) • Flutter version 3.19.2 on channel stable at /Users/rona/Sites/Tools/flutter • Upstream repository https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git • Framework revision 7482962148 (3 months ago), 2024-02-27 16:51:22 -0500 • Engine revision 04817c99c9 • Dart version 3.3.0 • DevTools version 2.31.1

The best option is probably Flutter right now: https://flutter.dev/

If you don't mind writing the UI native, sharing only business logic code, Kotlin is an option: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/multiplatform.html#kotlin-multip...

Kotlin also can do the UI if you use Compose: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose-multiplatform/ ... however, iOS support is still in alpha, and Web is "experimental". If you're not willing to cope with that (expect to have to change your code as they develop the framework) then Flutter is the way as it's pretty stable already on all platforms.

If you already know Typescript and React, you may also consider React Native: https://reactnative.dev/

In the competitive world of mobile app development, having a strong portfolio of Flutter projects is essential to stand out. Flutter, Google's UI toolkit, is renowned for its ability to create beautiful, cross-platform apps efficiently. Let's explore ten projects that can demonstrate your expertise and make your CV shine.

Deploying Dart functions to AWS Lambda enables you to utilize them not only within AWS Lambda but also integrate them with services like Amazon API Gateway, allowing you to leverage them in Flutter applications as well. This unified codebase in Dart offers great convenience.

[3]: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/tree/master/packages/flut...

Thanks - that link does not appear to be open access, anyways I don't think I've seen it. I'm familiar with Flutter at a high-level (Kevin Moore gave a great talk on it at Wasm I/O), and I think other than requiring users to work in Dart, it is probably one of the most powerful ways to do cross-platform UI today.

Worth noting that their original GPU backend was Skia, and now they are retooling around Flutter GPU (Impeller)[0], which is kind of designed similarly as an abstract rendering interface over platform-specific GPU APIs.

[0]https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Flutter-GPU

If you are considering Electron/React then I would suggest adding Flutter to your list of technologies to consider. It uses Dart (a language similar to C#) and has a lot going for it… relatively quick to get up to speed with, fantastic developer experience (e.g., hot reload, great IDE support, good development tools) and very strong cross-platform support: it generates native iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows and Linux executables. Check it out: https://flutter.dev/