Care for a Flutter? Google emits fresh version of all-things-app-platform, plus a tart-up for Dart

Flutter, Google's crack at a platform for mobile, desktop and web apps, has hit version 1.9 as the company targets Apple's upcoming iOS 13 and macOS Catalina. Its Dart language also got a tickle. The software was flung at coders during Google's Developer Days conference for Chinese source wranglers and this iteration will …

[Nathan 6]

Taking out behind the barn soon

Given Google's track record of quickly killing off these kinds of projects when critical mass is not attained quickly enough, I don't know what professional developer would bother investing time into this tool-chain. Especially considering, as pointed out in the article, that similar, more mature cross platform tools already exist, Codenameone, Phone Gap etc. Moreover, these tools don't require developers to learn a bunch of new languages. But huh, I guess they had to find a use for Dart, after it failed to kill of JavaScript I guess.

[karlkarl]

It just goes to show; no matter how cool and trendy a language is... it still relies on good ol' busted up / unsafe C.

FFI can only go so far; even thin bindings will require development time which adds costs and detracts from actually solving your clients problem. Which is generally why C is still so popular and will easily outlive Dart, Go, Python, Swift, etc. Possibly the only hope we have at getting away from C is "C-based" languages like Objective-C and C++. All these other languages are going the wrong way.

[RLWatkins]

"It's a first, a ground-breaking achievement!" Er, no, it isn't.

What about "the Xamarin-like thing of allowing developers to fling a single codebase at multiple platforms"? We've been doing that for years. It's called Java, or it's called Mono. (What Xamarin did was to port Mono to Android.)

And yes, Microsoft is now touting their "multi-platform Dot Net Core!" While Microsoft claims, as is their wont, that they got there first, we've also been doing *that* for years: one could use Mono to run ASP.Net apps on Linux five or ten years ago.

I *like* the new Google stuff, but the idea isn't new, nor is the capability new. Let's see whether it represents an improvement, and let's see whether they support it.