Dart 2.8 is out with a Flutter as Google claims to have solved the cross-platform dev puzzle

Google's first 2020 update of its cross-platform development toolkit has brought Flutter up to version 1.17 and the associated Dart language to 2.8. There are countless cross-platform libraries and frameworks out there, but a few things distinguish Flutter. First, it is entirely focused on GUI applications, primarily Android …

[karlkarl]

"as Google claims to have solved the cross-platform dev puzzle"

The cross platform dev problem was solved *years* ago.

ANSI C with a sh*tload of #ifdefs to connect it to the underlying platform.

Either you do it yourself, or you borrow someone elses work and use that. Flutter is the latter. Nothing has changed.

[J27]

Good luck finding a business who wants to pay 10x the price for the app over one written in a higher-level language.

[karlkarl]

Hmm, and yet most commercial GUI software released is written in C++.

What would be a hard push is convincing a business to use a fairly niche (and experimental) language just to use a specific GUI library.

[Dinanziame]

But is it used?

Developers' love is one thing; usability and feasibility a very different one. For instance, there are developers who really like Haskell...

[CederTree]

Dart is such a boring and conservative language, and like most things google make for developers, moving along at a glacial speed. No wonder their own developers wrote Angular in Microsoft's TypeScript rather than choose Dart. The community have been requesting null-safety and unions for years now. Looks like we'll eventually get null-safety, and then maybe in another few decades it might finally have half of the features of modern programming languages.

[karlkarl]

A language being boring and conservative is... my kinda language in all fairness XD

The recent surge in people realising the future is C++ and trying to improve it with fancy async features etc, is killing it IMO.

[Richtea]

Much better than previous miracle cures

We've been using it for a couple of months, to solve the Android/iOS dichotomy. I'd say at this stage - a whisker before the app's release - it's pretty good, with only a small number of wrinkles that need re-reading/checking.

Pros:

- It does what it says on the tin, i.e. build once deploy twice instantly. In our native app world that's about 30-40% dev time saved.

- reasonable performance - good enough for casual apps with some animated widgets/'congrats', but not for gaming

Cons:

-a new development pattern. That's harder than a language swap IMHO, because you can code bits in old school patterns, and then you'll get pulled up halfway through the project, and have to rework.

- when you need to go low level, you're back into the ugly world of native code (examples are decent splash screens, flexible app icons, etc)

- min APK size seems to be around 15Mb. An equivalent native app would usually be 4-8MB.

- You can hook Swift and Kotlin into Dart, but not into Java. You can go the other way (integrate a Flutter module into Java) but that's only good for Android devices, of course.

[Steve Evans]

Is this even legal?

Is developing for iOS on this even permitted by Apple?

Last time I looked at iOS development you had to use the Apple software, on a Mac (because it wasn't available on any other platform), whilst wearing a black turtle neck jumper and facing Cappuccino.

Failure to comply would result in a firm "No" from the Apple app store.

[Richtea]

Re: Is this even legal?

You still need an Apple dev account, a Mac to run Xcode, and some Apple devices to test on (you can wing it with emulators, but I'd recommend against that if you're serious).

Android Studio running on a Mac builds and install an .ipa using XCode and scripts.

So it's 'legal'.

This won't save your Apple-related outlay, but it saves you time. For newer devs, it might also save you having to learn Swift.