> Dart is like all of my dreams come true at once, Rust still gives me nightmares.
Dart is the worst new language I've tried and it should have died back when they (in retrospective rightfully) abandoned DartVM in Chrome plans. (FWIW I used Dart back in the AngularDart betas, before Angular 2.0 was released, when TypeScript didn't even have support for async/await. Back then Dart had some good ideas, the tooling was good and it looked promising. In the meantime TypeScript did everything better while being backwards compatible and JavaScript improved a lot, along with the tooling. Now days Dart is strictly inferior in my view, the object model is closed/static, type system is nominal, so it has none of the scripting language qualities, and the runtime/metaprogramming is limited, with shitty library ecosystem - it's a shittier version of Java.
It's a language designed by VM developers and it shows in every way possible, so much emphasis placed on how the implementation works - for a high level language that isn't that performant in the end anyway and is hardly the bottleneck in it's usage scenarios.
Meta programming is done with compile time code generation and there is no runtime reflection, look at the libraries built for dealing with immutability for example - the ergonomics are Java level bad.
Flutter is a good idea if you need to write cross platform LOB apps (it becomes a bad idea if you need to use native components and render in coordination with them because the async channel native communication introduces visible render lag, eg. if you try to build custom rendering overlays over native maps it will lag frames behind because by the time you receive the map viewport updates and rerender the native map moved forward).
The fact that Flutter is built on top of Dart means I will not touch that framework any time soon, and would recommend anyone who doesn't like writing Java style boilerplate to avoid it as well.
They would need to include serious quality of life features to the language, and these features were requested years ago, but they move at a snails pace and prioritise other stuff.
I'm going to have to disagree, straight up flutter fixes everything wrong with react native. I've wasted countless hours I'll never get back trying to get various Babel configurations to work. I guess typescript tries to fix issues with JavaScript not having real types, but you still have to fight Babel.
Why do I still need a bunch of weird configuration files to just get import working ? JavaScript has treated me very well, it's what allows me to pay my bills. It still has so many fundamental issues that I avoid it when I can.
The vast majority of apps ultimately either CRUD or LOB( thanks for the term). When I or a friend needs something hacked together real quick, Flutter is the answer.
Add in what might be the greatest Firebase integration, and that you can create CRUD apps in hours. Implement login, and authentication flows within minutes.
I don't feel like playing the true Scotsman game when it comes to getting things done, if it works it works.
In fact when I build these tools for my friends, or for myself I don't even build an app. I deploy directly to a website with Firebase
and Flutter web. Google makes us workflow insanely easy, I could probably deploy a new CRUD app with a login system in like an hour.
Ultimately all we need to do is render a list of items, create new items, update them and delete them. That's what the vast majority of apps do.
At least for my personal projects it's Unity for games, and Flutter for anything else.
Then again, I don't have a comp science background and I just love getting things done. I don't really care how Flutter accomplishes what it does. Your allowed to use both Dynamics and Types when defining methods. This really helps when trying to hack something together fast, but latter reffing it.
If a friend needs an app built to track grocery spending or what not, what stack would you pick.
Dart is the worst new language I've tried and it should have died back when they (in retrospective rightfully) abandoned DartVM in Chrome plans. (FWIW I used Dart back in the AngularDart betas, before Angular 2.0 was released, when TypeScript didn't even have support for async/await. Back then Dart had some good ideas, the tooling was good and it looked promising. In the meantime TypeScript did everything better while being backwards compatible and JavaScript improved a lot, along with the tooling. Now days Dart is strictly inferior in my view, the object model is closed/static, type system is nominal, so it has none of the scripting language qualities, and the runtime/metaprogramming is limited, with shitty library ecosystem - it's a shittier version of Java.
It's a language designed by VM developers and it shows in every way possible, so much emphasis placed on how the implementation works - for a high level language that isn't that performant in the end anyway and is hardly the bottleneck in it's usage scenarios.
Meta programming is done with compile time code generation and there is no runtime reflection, look at the libraries built for dealing with immutability for example - the ergonomics are Java level bad.
Flutter is a good idea if you need to write cross platform LOB apps (it becomes a bad idea if you need to use native components and render in coordination with them because the async channel native communication introduces visible render lag, eg. if you try to build custom rendering overlays over native maps it will lag frames behind because by the time you receive the map viewport updates and rerender the native map moved forward).
The fact that Flutter is built on top of Dart means I will not touch that framework any time soon, and would recommend anyone who doesn't like writing Java style boilerplate to avoid it as well.
They would need to include serious quality of life features to the language, and these features were requested years ago, but they move at a snails pace and prioritise other stuff.