What's New in Flutter 3.47

ggumby271 about 3 hours ago 37 commentsRead Article on flutter.dev

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Discussion Sentiment

88% Positive

Analyzed from 1061 words in the discussion.

Discussion (37 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

doodlesdev•about 1 hour ago

While I've used Flutter since Alpha, I've been away for a few years. A few things have shocked me in these release notes: how come Impeller still wasn't the default engine for all platforms? Also, why are they migrating to WASM if one of the core features of Dart is compiling to JavaScript? Finally, how come multi window support only get viable now, after four years having desktop support?

Honestly, Flutter is an extremely enjoyable development experience I would recommend anyone I care for to stay away from. The fact it's developed by Google doesn't help: it's a matter of time before they kill it like they did with so many UI libraries and frameworks already, specially with JetBrains developing Compose Multiplatform and the Android team going all-in in the Compose strategy.

skybrian•37 minutes ago

I suppose AI would help for porting your app if you need to? It's not like the old days.

Humphrey•about 1 hour ago

Oh finally multi-window support - I might finally be able to flutter for a simple desktop app side project I've been wanting to build.

Aldo_MX•about 2 hours ago

Decoupling material and cupertino makes a lot of sense.

gman83•about 2 hours ago

Yes, hopefully now that this decoupling is complete, they'll actually start being updated again. The progress was a bit stalled while this process was ongoing.

synergy20•about 1 hour ago

great for mobile apps, fine for desktops, basically unusable for browsers unless you do wasm, if web can be revamped/improved it can be the best option for cross platform GUI

tonyhart7•4 minutes ago

no one and absolutely no one pick flutter because they want do traditional web in the first place

its a cross platform framework that you can share component between mobile and other platform and always has been

Scene_Cast2•about 2 hours ago

Awesome. I'd love if Flutter could also finally get Impeller on Web (I'm tracking the GitHub issues, seems like there's progress at least).

I personally would like for it to pick up some ideas from Svelte.

kumarvvr•about 2 hours ago

The one thing I hate about flutter is the ui code having an ungodly amount of nested brackets.

skeledrew•33 minutes ago

For some reason I prefer those to curlies.

eddythompson80•about 2 hours ago

You clearly need more Lispmaxxing

superze•about 2 hours ago

Loc goes brrrrrrr. The tokenmaxxing of the 20s

jimbob45•about 2 hours ago

Of all the myriad projects from Google, how is Flutter/Dart the one that survived the axe? I’m not saying I hate them - I think they’re both really neat - I just don’t understand why Google keeps these limping along with weak support and no clear vision within their broader web ecosystem.

vmg12•about 2 hours ago

Easy, there are a few google teams that use flutter and the cost savings from not having to have dedicated ios and android teams is very easy to point at to justify the project's existence.

I think Dart and Flutter are very overlooked. The language has completely changed since its release, its statically typed, has null safety, enums, and pattern matching, and is very simple and easy to read. It has fast compilation and a ui framework with hot reload. It's as fast as Js on v8 while using less memory and has the overlooked feature of having very fast, almost 0 overhead, ffi.

I think the importance of good ffi is underrated for these ui languages. For reference, everyone that's using electron has to run two node processes doing ipc over a websocket connection. That's going to waste an absurd number of cpu cycles and memory when you are passing messages around when your app is basically a ui for a cli.

Larrikin•about 2 hours ago

But they also fund JetBrains, Jetpack Compose, and KMP. It feels like the company threw their support behind Kotlin a long while ago on mobile, but internal struggles keep the others limping along. Compose UI tooling no longer requires viewing on device.

invalidname•about 1 hour ago

You're thinking of Google as a single top down company. It isn't. Think of it as an anarchy of warlords where each pulls the strings and management doesn't really know what's going on.

Flutter made a lot of sense during the Oracle lawsuit when Google needed a way to show Oracle that it can pivot from Java. Now it no longer makes sense but the inertia is too deep.

My guess is that flutter is sold internally through the Huawei support as a leg within China.

cageface•about 2 hours ago

I’ve had good experiences with Flutter too. It’s actually much easier to build a performant macOS app with flutter than with SwiftUI.

formvoltron•about 2 hours ago

Curious how you feel about KMP and Kotlin Compose.

vmg12•about 2 hours ago

I like kotlin a lot but I didn't get to fully test KMP and Kotlin Compose. I chose flutter because I liked dart's wasm story better than kotlins.

gumby271•about 2 hours ago

How are they limping? Flutter has completely replaced it's rendering engine across all platforms and they're building out major window management support on desktop platforms.

At some point there's just not much exciting new stuff to add. Flutter is a nice stable platform, I'd highly recommend it.

kllrnohj•about 1 hour ago

> Flutter has completely replaced it's rendering engine across all platforms

And that new rendering engine is also why apps like Immich are unable to show HDR photos. Apple & Google both pushed broad support for that a couple years ago, with things like Ultra HDR and subsequently ISO 21496-1.

Meanwhile Flutter still doesn't really have wide gamut support https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/189155

Of course they need to prioritize where to spend resources, like any project, but Flutter also doesn't seem to be on any critical path for fancy headlining new features, either.

matchbok3•about 2 hours ago

Right, but, nobody uses it. So what's the point for Google?

doodlesdev•41 minutes ago

I've made a huge critic towards Flutter in another comment of mine, but adoption isn't it: the biggest bank in Brazil, with 135 million clients, is a digital bank whose sole interface is their Flutter app. They are different regarding tech choices (they use Clojure on the backend too), but I think it's a huge testament of how far along Flutter adoption has come.

Also, Google dogfoods it quite a bit.

vips7L•about 1 hour ago

The creator of flutter was on here saying that 1/3 of all apps on the App Store use it. That seems to be a lot more than “nobody”.

gkhartman•about 2 hours ago

Is that true though? I'm reading HN on an app built using Flutter. I had no idea until recently, so I would assume more apps could use it without my knowledge.

I understand it's limitations vs native apps, but there's quite a few cases where it really doesn't matter.

The biggest one for me is always the fear it will be abandoned. Pretty much goes for any cross platform app framework though.

monocasa•about 1 hour ago

Google AdSense uses it.

monocasa•about 2 hours ago

Google internally uses dart, and I remember hearing that adwords in particular was rewritten in dart at least for the frontend relatively recently.

So they're probably investing in it enough for basic maintenance, but don't really care about evolving the language.

skybrian•6 minutes ago

Sure, Adwords migrated from GWT to Dart. (And eventually I followed.) At one point, Dart moved from the Chrome division to the Adwords division. And Adwords alone can fund a team to do developer tools for them. Then, Flutter came a bit later.

It's been over a decade since then, though, and I'm out of touch now.

gman83•about 2 hours ago

I guess because they have buy-in from within Google? Google Pay, NotebookLM, Family Link, Google One, etc. are made with Flutter.

deepsun•about 2 hours ago

Most Google's projects that users loved were axed for a reason, typically internal management wars for promotions. Like YouTube really wanted to kill belowed Google Music, so they did. Or Google Pay vs Google Wallet.

Killing Flutter would not promote a manager. For now, of course.

Scene_Cast2•about 2 hours ago

In one of their dev surveys, they did float the idea of divesting Flutter.

skeledrew•31 minutes ago

Been waiting especially for multi-window so it can be picked up by Flet.

theanonymousone•20 minutes ago

Are you using Flet? If yes do you think it's mature enough and has a potential to stay long "in the game"?

amazingamazing•17 minutes ago

I always find it strange that flutter isn’t built with golang or typescript. Why create a new language? When flutter came out both languages existed so curious about that