alt Hacker NewsWhile I've used Flutter since Alpha, I've been away for a few years. A few things have shocked me in these release notes: how come Impeller still wasn't the default engine for all platforms? Also, why are they migrating to WASM if one of the core features of Dart is compiling to JavaScript? Finally, how come multi window support only get viable now, after four years having desktop support?
Honestly, Flutter is an extremely enjoyable development experience I would recommend anyone I care for to stay away from. The fact it's developed by Google doesn't help: it's a matter of time before they kill it like they did with so many UI libraries and frameworks already, specially with JetBrains developing Compose Multiplatform and the Android team going all-in in the Compose strategy.
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> how come Impeller still wasn't the default engine for all platforms
Because Impeller has had quite a bumpy ride. Even as recently as June I reported a bug/regression with basic stuff (lines with partial transparency on desktop). All my Android apps are still built with --no-enable-impeller because I've had many instances where the app just shows a blank screen due to driver conflicts.
It may be getting close to stable now, but it wasn't a smooth transition at all.
I suppose AI would help for porting your app if you need to? It's not like the old days.
We've been hearing that Flutter is going to be killed any day now for almost a decade. And yet here we are, it's a stable platform that's quietly chugging along with massive 3rd party buy in. Honestly, Google could abandon it at this point and it would have enough momentum to keep going just fine. Where is Compose Multiplatform? Does anyone actually use that, is it even stable yet?
Flutter operates more like a 2D game engine. It renders its own views, which involves a lot of arithmetic operations, making WASM a more efficient option than JS.