[isosphere]

Doing my web stuff in Rust was fine but concurrency was a pain. A crate that abstracts web workers with transferrable types would help. After that you have to pick a component library of which there are few, and all are experimental. Making pretty, performant things is hard. Switching compontent libraries isn't easy. The backend stuff is a breeze, I think Rust is doing fine there.

I'm switching to Flutter for my UX needs. There's flutter-rust-bridge that binds Rust code concurrently without any headaches in the client, and I can deploy to the web, android, Linux, etc. with ease. Looks p. good out of the box. Got GRPC working quickly, am happy.

Using Rust in the client is nice because I have a single workspace that contains all of my business logic. Backend changes will cause errors in the client code if changes are necessary. The codebase is easy to refactor and trust. Dart ain't half bad.

I stayed away from Flutter at first because it doesn't respect the DOM etc but at this point I'm willing to sell my soul to the devil for how easy it is to make a great UX that deploys anywhere.

I don't love relying on something Google made, though. Feels a little like building a foundation on sand.

[chrismorgan]

> I stayed away from Flutter at first because it doesn't respect the DOM etc but at this point I'm willing to sell my soul to the devil for how easy it is to make a great UX that deploys anywhere.

Great UX, you say? Great UX!? Flutter’s unashamed pure-canvas approach makes it fundamentally and unfixably awful. Links don’t work because they’re fake (and it’s impossible to fake them), scrolling is atrocious for a significant fraction of users, text handling is obnoxious and wrong… seriously, speaking as a user, I’ve come across things made with Flutter three times in the last four years (plus looking at their demos), and Flutter makes for literally the worst user experience that I have come across in that time.

Now Flutter does actually have a DOM renderer, but it never seems to be used. I’m not entirely sure why. Actually, scratch that, I just went to find a link, and found https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/web/renderers only talking about canvaskit and skwasm, no mention of the html renderer any more… it seems like they deprecated it earlier this year <https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/145954>, and will presumably remove it some time soon, doubling down on pure-canvas. Well, at least that lets me more unconditionally condemn Flutter for the web.

Text is bad, especially if you use emoji. Links are bad because they’re fake. Scrolling is bad for a decent fraction of users. And none of these three are fixable if you insist on pure-canvas. (Links you could kinda make work tolerably if you were willing to compromise a little, but the other two just can’t be done.)

If you want more substance to my complaints about the pure-canvas approach, search HN comments for “chrismorgan canvas” or similar. I still haven’t finished reducing it to an article on my website.

If you intend to target the web and care about the web at all, please don’t use Flutter.

[BrutalCoding]

Regarding that last sentence, it’s possible to have a DOM and yet still write it in Flutter.

There are a couple of options. While not first party, there is this solution for example: https://pub.dev/packages/jaspr

Here’s the difference between jaspr and Flutter Web explained: https://docs.page/schultek/jaspr/jaspr-vs-flutter-web

There’s another package, static_shock, although it’s purpose is to build static websites. The author was part of the Flutter team.

Article: https://blog.flutterbountyhunters.com/you-can-now-generate-s....

[chrismorgan]

> it’s possible to have a DOM and yet still write it in Flutter.

In Dart, that is; not Flutter. At that point, you’re probably wasting your time advocating for it, because people are mostly choosing Dart because of Flutter, so if you’re not using Flutter, you might as well use a different language.