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by kodah 1231 days ago
Fully native isn't especially realistic. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, general purpose tooling written by a small team can't support multiple native UIs.

What often works for me is something like Wails, but it has its limitations. For instance there's no multi-window functionality there either, and while the new Wails supports more OS integrations there's still some aspects that need improvement to compete with native UI.

I'd love to try Flutter, but frankly I don't want to write "backend-ish" code in Dart. There's some projects to be able to build UIs in Flutter and have processing done by a separate language that all gets bundled as one, but they're mostly hobby projects.

2 comments

Having worked on projects for both mobile platforms with small teams, I find that cross platform UI frameworks only really make sense for somewhat simplistic apps. The more involved the app in question is, the more these frameworks incur overhead with the extra surface area for bugs to occur on which is multiplied by the number of supported platforms.

The story on desktop is a little better but the same principle applies to some degree.

I’m shocked they’re still using Dart. Even if Dart is good, it’ll still be what prevents flutter from being widely adopted
It's an obvious area for a PR boost if the chips are looking down.

I can see the HN headline now...

"Rust support added to Flutter [34,432 karma]"

I'm using flutter_rust_bridge, it works pretty well. However, I do like Dart due to a few features it has, like code generation so that I can build my own language features if I want to, I use that pretty extensively.