[HN Gopher] Why doesn't flutter.dev use flutter as their front end?
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Why doesn't flutter.dev use flutter as their front end?
Author : owenpalmer
Score : 10 points
Date : 2022-11-14 19:31 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (flutter.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (flutter.dev)
| detaro wrote:
| Because it isn't an app? (and web still is kinda a side thing for
| flutter - you can do it, but it's not _the thing_ )
| postalrat wrote:
| "Flutter transforms the app development process. Build, test,
| and deploy beautiful mobile, web, desktop, and embedded apps
| from a single codebase."
|
| "The second thing" is pretty close to "the thing".
| detaro wrote:
| I care more about what's happening in practice than marketing
| speech semantics.
| feet wrote:
| "Test" is the second item in that list
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Shouldn't clicking the link answer the question?
|
| --edit--
|
| And since there's flutter devs here, how is dart as a general
| purpose programming language?
|
| I've looked into it a couple times but never really too hard
| because it didn't seem like the Linux support was all that good,
| probably changed now though.
| kevmoo1 wrote:
| Great question!
|
| While we'd love to be the best solution for every problem, it
| turns out the HTML-based web has been highly optimized for
| decades for text-heavy, linear, reading experiences.
|
| So we're staying focused on the places where Flutter does the
| best job: interactive, non-linear, more-create-than-consume.
|
| So our sites use HTML & CSS: flutter.dev, dart.dev, pub.dev
|
| And our devtools are built in Flutter Web:
| https://docs.flutter.dev/development/tools/devtools/overview
| Along with web experiences from rows.com, reflection.app,
| rive.app, supernova.io, and many more.
|
| FYI: I'm the product manager working on Flutter and Dart web tech
| at Google
|
| (edit: fixed domain, mis-added one app)
| owenpalmer wrote:
| > HTML-based web has been highly optimized for decades for
| text-heavy, linear, reading experiences
|
| If browsers offered a lower level graphics API, would that give
| a significant performance improvement over canvas?
|
| What is the performance bottleneck for flutter web? Is it the
| overhead of drawing to the canvas, or dom tree optimization?
|
| I'm very interested in this topic.
| yjbanov wrote:
| (disclaimer: I work on Flutter Web)
|
| It's mostly about algorithmic trade-offs. When you know your
| content layout is static and is highly biased towards
| vertical scrolling, you take different kinds of performance
| trade-offs, such as pre-computing and caching layout and
| painting output. Like when you know your array is sorted, you
| can use binary search to find an element instead of scanning.
| When pages do invalidate HTML layout you will actually see
| very bad jank. This is one of the classic performance
| pitfalls on the web, even using "classic" frameworks, like
| React or Angular. Flutter's current widgets and rendering
| primitives are biased towards dynamic content, where over-
| computation like this would hurt performance when you layout
| or paint isn't stable. Instead, we optimize for volatile
| content, using tricks like lazy rendering and repaint
| boundaries. We can still add primitives needed to render
| static content efficiently. We just feel like we're not yet
| sufficiently done with the non-static case.
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