> How long do you think Flutter will be supported by Google?

I am curious about how often this sentiment gets brought up about Go or Kubernetes.

Go and kubernetes clearly have reached a critical user mass that makes one confident other companies will maintain it even if for some reason google abandons ship.

flutter on the other hand is tremendously complex, and has yet to display any major company having bet their future on it.

I guess it depends on how frozen Go features happen to remain. while all modern alternatives release their value types + AOT tooling support.

At least Kubernetes won’t be in trouble since its no longer under the aegis of Google. CNCF is now the maintainer.

Go can easily within a year fade away to be replaced with something else. Remember MongoDB?

MongoDB still seems to be around and kicking?

I'm still a MongoDB cerificated developer. The popularity has dropped as with the amount of positions available.

There may come a time when this applies to Go.

I'm curious, what seems to be the Next Big Thing that is superceding MongoDB?

Graphql. Managed databases. A new beginning with Postgres for some.

Postgres is not new. It was part of my stack 10 years ago. So many new people have moved to postgres it has become hot.

My guess is returning to SQL databases. An SQL database can handle a surprisingly large workload pretty well and provides some very nice correctness guarantees.

It... depends. Remember Silverlight?

The last version of Silverlight, Silverlight 5 is actually supported until next year, 10 years after the initial 5.x release, which is not really "short" by any standard.

It's mostly the browser's ecosystem moved away from these for more standard based approaches.

"Supported" in a sense of patching security holes, sure. Not so much in a sense of writing new apps in it, or using modern tools to maintain old apps (support was dropped in VS 2017). So in that regard it's very unlike MFC or WinForms, which both enjoy continuous tooling support, and fixes and minor enhancements outside of security.

FWIW, I think your criticism is broadly valid, in that it's more of an exception for Microsoft, but much more common for Google. It's not hard to look at the Windows dev ecosystem, and see which parts of it are very stable, and likely to be around long term - because they have already been around for very long indeed.

I think the difference between MFC and WinForms, compared to Silverlight is that former are still widely used. albeit less than in the past with a lot more prevalence of web based applications.

Silverlight in other hand is a technology no modern web browsers support (in the same camp with gradually deprecated Flash and everything that requires plugins.), and perhaps to Microsoft it's a lot less justifiable to update it beyond security update.

Ahh, the good ol days. I lost count of how many Xaml-based UI Frameworks got released. In 2011 I started learning web development for UI, almost immediately after Microsoft announced Windows 8 and WinRT at build. This graphic [0] was the writing on the wall.

[0] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1555...

To be fair, not all of them were like that. E.g. WPF is very similar to WinForms, in that it doesn't see any major new features, but there's constant ongoing maintenance (including fairly big items, such as getting it to run on .NET Core), and all the development tooling is fully supported as well.