Of all the myriad projects from Google, how is Flutter/Dart the one that survived the axe? I’m not saying I hate them - I think they’re both really neat - I just don’t understand why Google keeps these limping along with weak support and no clear vision within their broader web ecosystem.
Easy, there are a few google teams that use flutter and the cost savings from not having to have dedicated ios and android teams is very easy to point at to justify the project's existence.
I think Dart and Flutter are very overlooked. The language has completely changed since its release, its statically typed, has null safety, enums, and pattern matching, and is very simple and easy to read. It has fast compilation and a ui framework with hot reload. It's as fast as Js on v8 while using less memory and has the overlooked feature of having very fast, almost 0 overhead, ffi.
I think the importance of good ffi is underrated for these ui languages. For reference, everyone that's using electron has to run two node processes doing ipc over a websocket connection. That's going to waste an absurd number of cpu cycles and memory when you are passing messages around when your app is basically a ui for a cli.
But they also fund JetBrains, Jetpack Compose, and KMP. It feels like the company threw their support behind Kotlin a long while ago on mobile, but internal struggles keep the others limping along. Compose UI tooling no longer requires viewing on device.
You're thinking of Google as a single top down company. It isn't. Think of it as an anarchy of warlords where each pulls the strings and management doesn't really know what's going on.
Flutter made a lot of sense during the Oracle lawsuit when Google needed a way to show Oracle that it can pivot from Java. Now it no longer makes sense but the inertia is too deep.
My guess is that flutter is sold internally through the Huawei support as a leg within China.
At the time Google went with Kotlin, Flutter was still very new and a much bigger step away from Java given Kotlin already back then was seamlessly integrated with Java and compiled to JVM bytecode.
How are they limping? Flutter has completely replaced it's rendering engine across all platforms and they're building out major window management support on desktop platforms.
At some point there's just not much exciting new stuff to add. Flutter is a nice stable platform, I'd highly recommend it.
> Flutter has completely replaced it's rendering engine across all platforms
And that new rendering engine is also why apps like Immich are unable to show HDR photos. Apple & Google both pushed broad support for that a couple years ago, with things like Ultra HDR and subsequently ISO 21496-1.
Of course they need to prioritize where to spend resources, like any project, but Flutter also doesn't seem to be on any critical path for fancy headlining new features, either.
I used to work at ByteDance and they alone employed I think more than 800 Flutter Devs. Douyin uses Flutter (the Chinese version of TikTok), Grab and Ebay use it, Alibaba and Baidu did too. Toyota and Volkswagen I think both use Flutter. Nubank I think is also a flutter app and they alone have like one hundred million some users.
With the popularity in the Chinese ecosystem alone there's gotta be a billion plus people using flutter.
I've made a huge critic towards Flutter in another comment of mine, but adoption isn't it: the biggest bank in Brazil, with 135 million clients, is a digital bank whose sole interface is their Flutter app. They are different regarding tech choices (they use Clojure on the backend too), but I think it's a huge testament of how far along Flutter adoption has come.
I really don't understand how/why people deny reality so hard when it comes to Flutter. Reminds me a bit of years ago when people were still scoffing at the idea of anyone actually adopting JavaScript to write web servers with while Node.js was very obviously eating up the market.
It eats the market indeed, and also presents business opportunities for folks like myself, jumping in writing C++ addons, or completely replacing it with Java, .NET, Go, Rust,....
All the more reason why it's important to have an accurate read on the market! I for one also know a few people who've made a pretty penny writing native integrations for React Native and now Flutter apps.
Is that true though? I'm reading HN on an app built using Flutter. I had no idea until recently, so I would assume more apps could use it without my knowledge.
I understand it's limitations vs native apps, but there's quite a few cases where it really doesn't matter.
The biggest one for me is always the fear it will be abandoned. Pretty much goes for any cross platform app framework though.
Thank you! It's been an excellent experience over the years really. Always easy to ship and always easy to keep up with flutter improvements which have come consistently.
Sure, Adwords migrated from GWT to Dart. (And eventually I followed.) At one point, Dart moved from the Chrome division to the Adwords division. And Adwords alone can fund a team to do developer tools for them. Then, Flutter came a bit later.
It's been over a decade since then, though, and I'm out of touch now.
They still maintaining it's predecessor that the Google "core properties" ran on: Closure (not Clojure), the javascript compiler. It's an evolution of the hack that Gmail initially was built on.
Most Google's projects that users loved were axed for a reason, typically internal management wars for promotions. Like YouTube really wanted to kill belowed Google Music, so they did. Or Google Pay vs Google Wallet.
Killing Flutter would not promote a manager. For now, of course.
People don't get how important it is to have control over the basically the whole programming ecosystem of a particular language. Google services dominate Flutter. Look at all the services Google provides. You'll find first class support in Flutter. Compare that to AWS, Azure, etc and these usually have wip features or simple adapters. So if you like and use flutter/dart, for whatever reason really, chances are you'll use any of Google's services because their integration into the framework is much better, and the libraries are better maintained.
I am convinced they did some proper analysis in-house and continuously find that investing the flutter/dart yields returns across all other services. The language/platform is the gateway.
