[jmull]

Flutter is DOA for anything but short-term projects.

For one thing, it’s tied to a custom language. That means there’s significant overhead for developers which shows itself directly as a learning curve, or indirectly in terms of hiring or retention of developers.

At least as significantly, they chose to implement custom controls (rather than wrap native controls). With that approach there’s really no way for them to implement native expectations for controls in the first place, much less keep up with native functionality across platforms.

[Qasaur]

I disagree strongly with this.

I'm currently writing a cross-platform app in Flutter that is launching soon, and I found that the developer experience is world-class and I've had very few issues so far. The language is incredibly easy to pick up with close to zero overhead if you are a somewhat competent programmer as it is essentially a very lightweight OOP language. My main languages are otherwise Go and Rust, and picking up Dart was not difficult at all for me and I don't think you need to be a wizard to figure it out. I suspect JS devs will find it even easier to pick up as many of the constructs are similar.

It took only a couple of days to get up to speed with Flutter-specific functionality as well as the native API bindings, and I was already writing production code for the app the first week of exposure to the language. The UI framework is declarative and very easy to reason about and design, and the tooling is also incredibly seamless and easy to use, although I do agree that it needs some polishing as there are some edge cases that you sometimes need to trawl the Github issues page to fix.

Yes, sometimes it is frustrating as there are some things that are lacking in the standard library, but the third-party library scene is picking up and you can do 95% of what you want to do without major issue. I'm convinced that Flutter is going to become bigger in the future and is going to cover most use cases for all but the most performant apps and perhaps games.

[marklubi]

To follow on this, I've had more "wow" moments with Flutter than from any of the tech stacks I've ever worked with.

Flutter is a breath of fresh air after building and maintaining the same app over and over again for several platforms.

[self_awareness]

I've released two Flutter apps on Google Play and I don't see Flutter in such pink colors. Every SDK update makes some users change their ratings because the app starts crashing for them, even when I'll make trivial changes. Cupertino theme is bugged on Android. Flutter team is OK with doing breaking changes to widgets, so when you update, prepare your self that you may need to rewrite some parts of your app, because some widget has changed, etc.

[pjmlp]

Flutter will be to Dart as Rails to Ruby, if the political wars between Chrome, Android and Flutter don't kill it first, that it the only thing Dart will be relevant for.

[preommr]

> For one thing, it’s tied to a custom language.

Are you talking about Dart?

If so, that's absolutely savage, lmao. To not only call it a "custom" language but not even name it. The amount of disrespect - and the worst thing is I don't even think it was intended. Even if this is one person, I think this speaks volumes about how much of a joke the language is.

It's just so sad. And to think that the team behind flutter purposefully chose it after considering a bunch of other languages.

[literallycancer]

Well they did add the compiler half way through.

You can write idiomatic Dart code that won't run because Flutter asserts crash it at runtime. And you fix it by writing code that the Dart compiler complains about but lets you run and it works (even though it shouldn't). Is there another compiled language where this is the norm?

What's the point of dealing with a half baked ecosystem when there are much better languages available?

[fctorial]

I don't think he meant it that way. He's probably trying to say that depending on a "custom language" is a bad thing in itself.

I personally don't feel that dart is tied in any way to flutter. It was originally meant to be compiled to js, and that shows in vm architecture, but that doesn't look like a con.