alt Hacker NewsAs someone who used all these frameworks professionally for years, I highly agree. Although, I do not prefer Expo due to it's highly annoying build system and dependency hell, but React Native itself in that case. While I understand Google wants a horse in this race, Flutter doesn't feel like a horse to bet on.
- Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java and Javascript and turned them into a language. Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use.
- While there is no Skia anymore, the whole custom rendering of Flutter often caused more trouble than not, from the UI implementation itself all the way to specific low-end chipsets not being supported.
- Ecosystem propagates these insane architectures that don't make much sense and are made to either print apps as fast as possible or to emulate some Clean Code like behavior.
- Web still feels terrible to use, even after all these years.
Since I'm not happy with any of these, I've even taken upon writing a framework of my own that renders into native UI and works with any language (gonna shill it here https://hypen.space). It was inspired directly by years of working with mobile and experiencing the pains of crossplatform development such as Flutter and Expo. We can do better than these!
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Completely opposite experience for me.
I love working with Dart (which IMO is _not_ "worst parts of Java and Javascript (...) turned (...) into a language", "Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use" - quite the opposite, actually) and its toolchain, including Flutter.
I find the architecture simple to follow, no need for "either print apps as fast as possible or to emulate some Clean Code like behavior", though I do think some people use overcomplicated state management solutions. But nobody forces anybody to do that.
My experience with Web has been fine so far and I've seen fully cross platform Flutter apps working absolutely fine on mobile, desktop and web.
This is not to gaslight your experience, YMMV after all.
And React Native, with its dependency hell, project rot, npm ecosystem under the hood, and transpilation with lax runtime leaking into TS, is a total no-go for me. Though I base this opinion partially on my experience with NodeJS, and partially on that of my friends who use RN.
Btw. Does your platform support bundling UI in addition to streaming it from the server? How large is the bundled runtime?
PS. Clicking on "see all supported platforms →" on your project's homepage gives 404 for https://docs.hypen.space/docs/adapters .
> Dart is a really _ugly_ language with lots of tiny annoyances. Its as if someone took worst parts of Java and Javascript and turned them into a language. Terrible to write, terrible to read, terrible to use.
While I’m a bit ambivalent towards Flutter, I totally disagree with you on Dart. To me it’s a better version of Java/Typescript with a very mature cross-platform and JIT/AOT compiler. Admittedly there are some things I wish they would take from TS (like discriminated unions), and I haven’t tried “modern” Java either so maybe that’s improved, but even so, I rarely feel like Dart is getting in the way.
I created something similar to Hyphen at my previous job and while it was a big shift in mentality, implementing UI in the backend and having the apps consume that and render it with native components os really underrated.
> Although, I do not prefer Expo due to it's highly annoying build system and dependency hell
Highly agree with this. I'm almost done moving an app off it into React (web, not native) because the SDK upgrades kept including unlisted breaking changes to the point I can't upgrade anymore. Biggest culprit was Reanimated.
I’ve been keeping an eye on hypen.space and hope it succeeds. What is the level of maturity now and are there any multiplatform app examples that are not trivial?
hypen looks very similar to SlintUI, isn't it?
Google has two horses in this race, because Android team doesn't acknowledge Flutter and rather go with KMM and Compose, alongside JetBrains.