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by the_duke 1888 days ago
In general I agree with your points, but:

> What WASM will never be good at is being used for the whole experience.

The Flutter team would disagree.

They are leaning on WASM for browser builds of Flutter apps, with the whole app rendering in a canvas.

They do accessibility via separately created accessibility trees.

The experience far from great at the moment, but give it a few years and I think it will get there. (better wasm optimisations, direct host interop without JS shims, GC, threads, maybe WGPU instead of canvas, ...)

If that's a good thing for the web is another question...

3 comments

Unfortunately, Flutter apps still seem to be lagging on the accessibility front. The Flutter web gallery[0] has many examples of beautiful apps, but something as "simple" (on the web) as being able to select text is absent.

For some use-cases, this is a nonstarter. (Sadly, not to as many as I'd like! But let's simply not regress, to start.)

[0] https://gallery.flutter.dev/

It also seems to be lagging on the literal front, at least on my iPad.

Considering these are just hello world apps, the performance has a long way to go.

It’s worth keeping in mind that Flutter for web had its 1.0 release a matter of weeks ago. It’s very impressive with what they have done so far but let’s see where it goes. The amount of potential there is truly huge.
Agree that it's exciting to see, but what's the actual potential? Flutter developing into a latter-day Macromedia Flash?
It’s genuinely hard to tell if you are serious about this or not. Either way it somehow perfectly encapsulated the kind of thing this website is famous for. Congratulations?
Flutter feels so strange to me. In many ways, it's reimplementing major parts of a browser, compiled to (web)assembly, running inside a browser compiled to assembly... Watch five years from now someone add a low-level programming framework to Flutter and then soneone else reimplement the browser using that
Flutter is a UI framework on top of a low level programming framework, Dart. Sort of like UIKit and Cocoa.
I think you're thinking of Skia. Dart is a language.
Turtles all the way down! It would be more humorous if we used Skia, since that arguably fulfill's OPs proposition that someone would eventually rewrite the browser in said framework
The flutter web text field don't even handle multiline text input with IME properly. Cause the whole text field to scroll while select character from IME dropdown. I'd doubt how could that be count as "good user experience".