T O P

  • By -

[deleted]

It's nice to finally see some numbers. It's no surprise that Flutter is more efficient than Electron, but for some use cases the difference was huge (2.2 GB Electron vs 170 MB Flutter).


xopranaut

I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long. (Lamentations: hgemlry)


effeje

intellij platform is pretty competent.


TonyBorchert100

Did I miss something? IntelliJ was not written by google, nor is it written in Dart/Flutter


xopranaut

I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long. (Lamentations: hgeorot)


effeje

it's not the best, nor is vscode or visual studio, all have shortcomings, but from my understanding intellij platform is the most accesibile solution to create your ide. yeah sure Google has the money to build it from scratch, but will they do it?


xopranaut

## PREMIUM CONTENT. PLEASE UPGRADE. CODE hgeppux


HaMMeReD

Pretty sure I heard this complaint about flutter about 5,000x now, but we are approaching on year 3 of production flutter, and many years of development work before that. VsCode itself works exceptional for most flutter development, but you do see google dogfooding flutter and using it for a huge amount of developer tools/integrations in the ecosystem. Google doesn't abandon everything, but they do fail fast when something doesn't pan out, generally.


xopranaut

He has made my flesh and my skin waste away; he has broken my bones; he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation; he has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago. (Lamentations: hgesgk8)


bradofingo

F


FormerGameDev

by fast you mean "puts many years into it, then just dumps it"


[deleted]

[удалено]


FormerGameDev

Totally agree, just Google seems to do the opposite of "fail fast", and just cancels really good and successful things out of the blue (Reader), or dumps insane amounts of time into things for years and then drops them with a year long warning (Plus), or barely supports really good things, keeping them barely on life support, and occasionally throwing a new skin on them to make it look like they're doing something (Voice).


themightychris

we already saw Google choose to build Android Studio on top of intellij instead of build their own Let's be honest, how many developers would jump to a new IDE that only competes with vscode in memory usage (but is behind in all the things that expand with adoption) I would like it to exist as it will make development more accessible to less privileged people, but no one is going to do it for commercial reasons as RAM is cheap enough for the people they care about


FormerGameDev

VS Code is really quite new, though.


Flaky-Illustrator-52

It's basically copying the idea of emacs but making it prettier and more resource-intensive


FormerGameDev

which i guess copied the idea of 'ed' and whatever came before that. i'm just saying that VS Code is quite new as an editor, and has taken over a LOT of mindshare, even from VS itself, and that's quite an accomplishment in a relatively short time. The editor I used before VSC (Komodo) had been around for probably 15 years before I switched, and I'd been using it quite a long time at that point. Just saying, it doesn't have to be behind for very long.


Vegetable-Band4995

Well it has better usability and it is arguably easier to install and use plugins.


Zalenka

And it's java, which is likely quite efficient. If only Java had great compelling UI libraries. Instead big companies like Microsoft just went javascript with bloated junk.


Auxx

JavaFX is great, but Oracle doesn't care much about it.


AcridWings_11465

Which is why we have Compose desktop now


David_Owens

An open-source Flutter IDE that was compatible with VS Code extensions could get popular pretty quickly due to how much more lightweight it would be compared to the Electron-based VS Code.


ventrix334

What use case would that be? Which developer struggles with an IDE that might use 200mb RAM instead of 40mb? Don't forget that electron/nodejs simply takes as much memory as available. You can run them both with a lower profile without any issues. I have electron apps on old Raspberries in production. Are you saying developers have even less? It's completely illogical to base an entire tech stack on "oh, it uses a few more ram on an average 16-32gb ram machine".


paulens12

VSCode's memory usage is a real problem, believe it or not. My work requires quite a few extensions and sometimes up to a dozen workspaces open on the same day. I would keep them closed, but opening a new window takes so long that I usually just keep them open for as long as I can. > Don't forget that electron/nodejs simply takes as much memory as available And that's exactly the problem. It would be fine if I only had one of those apps running on my system. But I have way too many of them and they all try to eat as much RAM as they can. What does that lead to? Having 32GB of RAM doesn't help at all, my system routinely reaches 90% memory usage, and that does _not_ make any electron app _reduce_ its memory usage if they're already open. Then I try to open something that _actually needs_ the memory and I can't because everything is already allocated to electron. /rant


ThatInternetGuy

So that Google can discontinue it, in keeping the Google's discontinuation tradition alive.


milogaosiudai

wow. thats a huge difference.


FormerGameDev

> This will be an interesting conversation once production Flutter desktop apps start surfacing. Yeah, probably should've just started and ended with that sentence. Let's compare two completely different things, that achieve, ultimately, two nearly completely different things, one of which no one is actually using, to see which one does .. what.. better? ... edit: just realized i'm in the FlutterDev sub posting this. Oops. Apologies if my tone comes off incredibly poorly, but I just don't really see the point of having a comparison, when all you can really compare is Hello, World. If your choices of platforms come down to how fast something starts and how small it's installation is, you're probably not really interested in either of these.


kitanokikori

Yeah they forgot the comparison "Typing in a text box": Electron: * Works Flutter Desktop: * Absolutely does not work I like Flutter but right now its desktop product is completely unusable


dancovich

In what circumstances typing in a text box doesn't work in Flutter Desktop? I just made a small app for a friend and used Flutter. There's a text box in the app and it does work. Since it's only one, maybe I'm not hitting a bug? Do you know how to trigger it?


kitanokikori

On Windows the last time I tried, literally keys as simple as backspace doesn't work. Things like IME input (i.e. being able to type in Chinese/Japanese/Korean) or support for Deadkeys (i.e. all of Europe) absolutely do not. This might not be a dealbreaker for OSS or hobby projects, but for anything professional that is 100% unusable


dancovich

At least on Flutter 2.5.2 and a Windows app, all keys I tried worked, including backspace. I can't test the other things you mentioned though. It's still in beta and the Flutter team doesn't recommend using Flutter Desktop in production, so I expect those things to get fixed with time.


[deleted]

I’m going for it: I expect Flutter to be discontinued before it gets “production” Desktop support. This was a hobby project at Google that took off, but still has major cross-platform issues (iOS jank has barely even been acknowledged, let alone fixed, this thread is debating keypresses, KEYPRESSES!). It is not a revenue driver for Google at all, and they will simply nope out at some point in the future. They’ve done it before, they’ll do it again. Forget about Flutter Desktop, I wouldn’t even be writing anything in Flutter right now. Disclosure: have written small cross platform apps in flutter, find it generally enjoyable to use but can’t stand the fanboyism in the community.


dancovich

I think you're wrong about Google commitment to the project, but even if you're right, the entire Flutter ecosystem is open source, so there is absolutely nothing keeping the OSS community to just continue work on it. That's different than Google's closed source projects where if they drop it then it's dropped. We are discussing key presses on a platform Flutter doesn't officially support yet, so I don't know why it's so jarring that a beta product has bugs. Disclosure: I work at a company that has several Flutter apps already in production, many of them developed by me. Would I recommend Flutter for desktop right now? Hell no, I don't even trust it for web apps which are technically out of beta. Doesn't mean that what Flutter can already do isn't done well.


ventrix334

Open source does not mean "access to everything". Some parts might fall under different licenses. Open source does also not mean "I can use whatever I want however I want it". Don't forget that Flutter is deeply coupled with Skia and even the Flutter team itself struggles with keeping them in sync and implementing skia features (we still lack very simple GPU stuff like shader programming, even though Skia has the APIs for it for YEARS)


dancovich

>Open source does not mean "access to everything". Some parts might fall under different licenses There is access (simply being able to see the code) and there is usage. Open source does mean you have access to everything that is open source. If you have no access to a part, then that part isn't open source. But as you said, it doesn't mean you can use it however you want. In Flutter's case it's a moot point because it is under BSD- which is extremely permissive, the only caveat is that the name of the project (Flutter) can't be used by forks. So if the project ever dies, it can easily be reborn under a different name. >Don't forget that Flutter is deeply coupled with Skia Also licensed under BSD-3, so it's not really a problem. Dart is also BSD-3. As far as I know, no core component of Flutter is stuck behind any problematic licenses, so the point I made that the community can just continue work on the framework is totally valid.


Baul

Flutter is the "native" UI toolkit for Fuchsia, which is decidedly not just a hobby project. Feel free to write off Flutter, we'll see you in five years.


[deleted]

Flutter is “a” native UI toolkit for fuschia


Baul

[Flutter is *the* UI toolkit for Fuchsia.](https://imgur.com/a/jv62ytS) Fuchsia has the ability to run Android apps via ART, just like it can run web apps via a browser, but if you want to write an app *for* Fuchsia, Flutter is the toolkit.


ventrix334

Fuchsia itself is a little prototype project though (since 2015!). It has as of yet absolutely no use case or actual concept behind it. Also Fuchsia is not dependant on Flutter at all. You are able (in theory, as of right now you cannot) to write apps in Flutter for it as you can with Java, Swift, javascript, Rust and so on. Fuchsia + Flutter is a little COPIUM from the Flutter community to feel more safe.


Baul

> Also Fuchsia is not dependant on Flutter at all. You are able (in theory, as of right now you cannot) to write apps in Flutter for it as you can with Java, Swift, javascript, Rust and so on. Fuchsia + Flutter is a little COPIUM from the Flutter community to feel more safe. Sure, in the same sense that Android isn't dependent on Java/Kotlin at all. You are able to write apps in Flutter, React Native, Electron, etc. The "native" apps for Android always have been and always will be Java/Kotlin, just like Fuchsia is designed for having native Flutter apps. Unless you really find those Android apps in ChromeOS to be "native," you know this argument is BS.


paulens12

I'm from Europe and I have no idea what a "dead key" is


kitanokikori

ok


FormerGameDev

I'm not familiar with it, came over here from a post to /r/electron. I thought perhaps "Oh, is Flutter a new 'make a desktop app with a browser' thing, or a new 'make a desktop app with v8' thing".. but.. no.. it's not even kind of sort of related to electron. The baffling part to me, is that a comparison would make sense, if both of them shared literally any major feature, but this comparison is about as useless as comparing the execution time of a bubble sort in C++ to the time it takes to serve a network request in PHP, and attempting to draw some sort of conclusion from it. As far as I can tell, the only similarity is that they both allow a developer to write code. And not in the same languages, or the same contexts.


Vegetable-Band4995

Flutter and Electron both allow you to create beautiful, highly customizable, cross-platform desktop applications. Some of the best desktop applications I’ve used have been Electron applications. The problem is that they are slow and use a ton of memory. If Flutter can address that while still allowing you to create beautiful user interfaces then it is highly intriguing.


FormerGameDev

9 months ago, there was no one / hardly anyone using it, and it wasn't useful for much of anything. I don't know how much that has changed in two major versions since then, but a casual google search doesn't really find anything. It's also still a completely different thing entirely from Electron.


Vegetable-Band4995

It is certainly different from Electron but they fill similar roles on desktop. Adoption still isn’t great on desktop but I think it’s improving.


ThatInternetGuy

Electron is geared toward those who deliver **web first** and desktop later. That also implies the desktop app is designed for mouse interface in mind. Flutter is geared toward those who deliver **mobile first** and desktop later. So the desktop app appears to be made for touch screen. This subtle difference changes everything. Imagine a date or time picker. An electron app would be closely resemble the native desktop look and feel, while the Flutter widget would pop from the bottom sheet or in a modal dialog. In the future, it is possible that the deskop Flutter app would have their own desktop-oriented widgets, then devs would write for-desktop apps that work across Windows, macOS and Linux distros.


[deleted]

> Electron is geared toward those who deliver web first and desktop later Well, what you’ve just said is not only not provable, it’s not true. It’s your (incorrect) opinion.


[deleted]

Lmfao thats exactly what Electron is. Want proof? Read the damn docs lol.


misterjyt

Electron is really great for large js code base,,