[solatic]

I played around with Flutter a couple years ago for a project that required a mobile app, and walked away really impressed with Flutter and Dart. It's a much, much nicer language for building UI in compared to React Native and even the native languages. But the backend story with Dart was very much neglected. I got the feeling that Flutter's main developers at Google were the driving force behind Dart development, and the lack of backend adoption for Dart at Google was causing it to wither on the vine for backend purposes.

Is the ecosystem support improving here? People end up needing libraries for all kinds of backend stuff, not just auth and SQL like you have on your roadmap. What about sending emails, hooking into payment providers / billing, queues/pubsub, observability...? Doesn't this need to exist first, to make building backends in Dart feasible, before building a framework that makes it easier?

[dillonnys]

The ecosystem support is improving, and still needs help. I think we can drive both in parallel so that the framework feeds use cases to the ecosystem which then lead to more complex backends. It's hard to put one before the other, but can be a really powerful flywheel.

Although it's not listed on my landing, it is absolutely a goal of Celest to be a funnel for these use cases and partner with the community as we go to fill the gaps.