Flutter looks good, but is painful

Re:Flutter looks good, but is painful by pjmlp on Monday August 05, 2019 @08:36AM (#20613615)

I remember the days of Apple II, TSR-80, Commodore 64, Commodore 128, ZX Spectrum, ZX Spectrum 128K, ZX Spectrum 128K +2A, ZX Spectrum 128K +3A, Atari, Atari ST, Amiga 500, Amiga 600, Amiga 1200, PC CGA, PC EGA, PC VGA, PC PS2,.....

Platform fragmentation exists since ever.

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Re:Flutter looks good, but is painful by iainmerrick on Monday August 05, 2019 @09:21AM (#20613950)

You’re right, of course! It’s amazing to think how many 8-bit and 16-bit games got ported to a whole bunch of different computers.

I was thinking mainly of the 90s and early 2000s, I guess, and for desktop apps where the main platform of interest was Windows, followed by a long tail of Mac, X-Windows, BeOS, etc... All those platforms could “easily” (i.e. with effort, but no rocket science required) be handled by a single C/C++ codebase with platform-specific #ifdefs.

I think the equivalent for today’s platforms would have to be Javascript. Unlike the C/C++ approach, you lose direct access to platform features.

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