Re:Flutter Release Preview 2
by eseidelGoogle on Thursday September 20, 2018 @02:04AM
(#18030120)
(Disclosure: I'm the Eng. Mgr for the Flutter project at Google.)
I've seen Flutter run in lots of places, including desktops. Desktop isn't something my team is actively developing at this time (we're very focused on making mobile awesome), but we're definitely not stopping others from doing so. There is even another team at Google experimenting with the idea:
Thank you so much for the work on the language/platform. I used to work for Google (LAX), and our team was using GWT, hopefully they have transitioned to Dart + Angular (by now). I fell in love with Flutter right away, but it was in no way connected to what I did back there.
I'm working on a project to get Flutter running on Mac and Windows: https://feather-apps.com
There's also this project which uses Go to run Flutter on Windows and Linux: https://github.com/Drakirus/go-flutter-desktop-embedder
Is your Windows implementation publicly available? I'd be curious to check it out.
I did some experimentation back in March, but it wasn't my work, I've found that Dwayne Slater (ds84182 on github) has made some modifications (with SDL) to get it through https://github.com/ds84182?utf8=&tab=repositories&q=flutter
I was able to get the gallery on, had to do some tweaks (like enforce binary mode when reading files, and certain other things, but haven't looked since then).
I dabbled (briefly) in it, got flutter app running on windows + linux, though certain integration factors (smooth window resizing, stability, mouse wheel support, etc.) were not there yet.
For some of them (mouse wheel, keyboard, tabbing) there might be more work needed (and maybe not seen as important), but it could bring a real "electron" killer, where my slack, teams or whatever else "electron" app does not spawn 5 processes, and take GB of memory (granted, flutter still takes a lot, compared to leaner Qt, and much much leaner write directly using Win32), but then there are some sensible limits, and going below these (for the sake of perfection) doesn't buy you much nowadays (I no longer have to run QuarterDeck QEMM to shuffle my 640kb DOS+EMS memory efficiently around :))