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I’ve been using Dart/Flutter for over a year now building an open source iOS/Android/Web app. In general, Dart is a solid language, and we enjoy writing code in it. The package management, for example is comparable to other best in class managers, like Rust’s Cargo and a huge leap forward from languages like Python. All the tooling (linting, formatter) takes the lessons Google learned from Go and applies them to Dart.
Additionally, It’s both an interpreted (with JIT) and a compiled language. Flutter uses this to hot reload code in development, but also to ship a leaner binary in production. On the server, native binaries are great for CLI tools for easy deployment, and the JIT is great for servers where processes are longer running and performance is more important than process size. Although it’s reasonably fast either way.
That being said, it’s a pretty boring language. It doesn’t have many expressive features to reduce boilerplate. While it does have reflection, no one uses it because it can’t be used in Flutter when compiling native binaries. Very few people are willing to make packages that don’t work in Flutter. People generally resort to code gen, which is clunky and adds another process to development.
On the server, there are not many options. The ‘shelf’ package is the default, but it falls short in many areas, making developers cobble together different packages. There are others, the one I’m watching is Frog[0], but adoption is slow. However, it is pretty much just another Next.js style clone, not adding anything novel to the space.
My hope is that the cloud providers will roll out native Dart support to their FaaS products, so I can at least share my model code between apps and the backend. However, the dream (well, my dream at least) is to have a full end-to-end Dart/Flutter solution that is real-time/reactive and not REST-based. Something like a programmable Firebase where I don’t have to deal with un/marshalling data myself all the time. I think that will get Flutter devs enough reason to move to Dart on the backend.
[0] https://dartfrog.vgv.dev/