They announced beta version for Windows in the last few weeks, so what to expect? I've been using it on linux desktop for 4 months so far, there were many problems, but it's absolutely the best framework so far. It's miles ahead of Qt (which I've been programming in since 2010). Dart and flutter are just years ahead of Java, C#, Qt and React Native in terms of positive programmer experience, productivity, good looking UI. There are so many bad things to say too, but all I can think about are only due to immature ecosystem, but that's changing literally daily.
Why do you feel C# is worse then Dart?
Got any eamples of ADTs, pattern matching, immutable collections, data classes, named parameters, etc.?
Coming from Scala and TypeScript the Dart language is pretty unappealing wrt syntax and functionality, kind of archaic actually. Flutter looks amazing and have been hoping that Dart would evolve more quickly than it has.
There’s about 4 different packages that provide immutable collections, built_collections might be the most popular.
Would you mind elaborating?
I founded the nested tree of widgets syntax good after getting over the (short) initial learning curve. Some basic good programming practice over shared bits and it was very maintainable even for complex screens.
Flutter Widgets, like HTML are declarative. They're just hierarchical information. This works in HTML, and it works in Flutter - there's nothing to get confused about.
Nested control flow (if statements, loops etc.) obscures the actual behaviour and so good practice is to break it up until it is clear and understandable.
Developing once for iOS and Android seems obvious and doable, but extending that to the web is a different game.
After shipping an app in it this year I've become a big fan of Kotlin Native, you can do enough code sharing to take the edge of doing two apps as a solo dev while having very little friction to access native views and APIs. The two apps feel like platform citizens on each OS but I have networking, persistence, utils and state management shared between them.
This sounds like Flash all over again. Let me guess - no native text select, copy & paste supported? Scrolling is "wrong" in a subtle way?
Here's an example of text fields: https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/demo/text-field
Right-click and you have access to the browser context menu; choose Inspect and you can see a <textarea> or <input> control.
Flutter for Web further feels like a nightmare for accessibility. I tried enabling the native Google screenreader on my device. It only says "No text found at that location" when I try to read any of the Flutter demo pages in either Chrome or Firefox. In addition to being extremely hostile to people with disabilities, it will soon actually be illegal to build new products with accessibility-hostile tech like Flutter for Web for large parts of the European public and private sector:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Accessibility_Act
> we're still in beta
From these viewpoints that feels more like an early alpha product. In 2020 no accessibility support is a non-starter.
There are so many obvious problems with it:
- Everything relies on 1500 nested custom elements with hardcoded transforms to put them in place
- This breaks default browser interaction with the page entirely. Because what may look like a page is actually a bunch of absolutely positioned controls with absolutely positioned canvas inside them.
- Scrolling, one of the most important things in a browser, is broken. It's janky and slow (manually re-implemented?). I'm guessing containers have to be explicitly marked as scrollable with correct sizes, because resizing the browser window does not make content scrollable (try it with the demo you linked).
- Text is broken. Because it's rendered onto a canvas. So, all text interactions + accessibility is broken. Fonts are rendered incorrectly. I mean, on the demo page you can't even copy code other than through the "Copy All" button.
- Navigation is broken. Navigating the demo apps (which have more than one page) is not reflected in the url, so the back/forward buttons are broken
- Keyboard navigation is broken. Nearly none of the elements can be tabbed to. Except some buttons in demo pages. I guess they are explicitly marked as such?
- When elements can be navigated to by keyboard, they can only be activated by Spacebar. Even though Enter also exists. I'm pretty sure forms cannot be submitted by pressing enter, either.
- iOS-style date pickers are clipped in Safari
- 2D transformations demo is broken in Safari
It's just me spending five minutes on the demo site.
The effort is certainly commendable. It's not beta yet. It's possible you may want to scrap this and go the Figma route. They implemented their own rendering engine in WebGL: https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...
-
And clicking around seems to completely ignore my back button.
And hotspots didnt change to the finger cursor.
It looked pretty slick, except for those points. Oh well...
Basic features like selecting the text doesn't work.
EDIT: thanks for the downvote. But you don’t have to take my word for it, this sentiment is (privately) shared by Googlers themselves working on Chrome and PWAs.
On the web it's DOA for most use cases - it's just a canvas, so scrolling, text selection, shadow rendering, etc. is custom, doesn't feel native and must be downloaded and compiled.
It can have a future on desktop. One "cultural" obstacle is that the de facto default widget system is Material, which is simply a wrong approach to desktop UI.