I've been writing a desktop app using Flutter and couldn't be happier honestly. The widget pattern makes sense, the bloc library does what it's supposed to do, and just building an app is mostly on you. My blossoming love of Dart has also been a nice but welcome surprise. It has a couple weird spots and irritations, but so does literally everything else... It works well for the problem space its used in and has the necessary language features to get the job done without blowing off your feet.
Writing a desktop app _on_ and for Linux, that works on MacOS, and Windows ... and a web browser is beyond awesome. It'll probably work well on Android and iOS, with little effort, but I haven't even bothered to try yet. Before I add a dependency I will check out the code and run the demos (if there are some). I haven't had one fail or render strangely yet on a Linux desktop and nearly all of the existing packages were originally created/intended for a mobile device.
With web support, I personally have zero reason to ever write a line of JavaScript again. Why would I want to roll all my own basic widgets? I don't. Writing the logic for a performant and interactive list view, in JS and HTML, is woefully boring to me. I want a list view I can give data to and have a meaningful display of my data. I do not want to browse twenty different packages to find a list view that is the right mix of code I don't hate and features I actually want. I want that done because it's a solved problem, and takes time to solve right.
I couldn't be more excited for this release and future ones because Flutter is providing me a solution that fucking works.
I’m still having a hard time believing any « flutter is so great for me » testimonies, because my personnal experience with app having only the most basic list screen has always between a disaster. There’s such a big discrepancy between those testimonies and my experience that i’m starting to become suspicious about their authenticities
What was the actual problem with your list? The default list worked really well for me, even when not correctly building the child. What platform were you using it on or building for? I'm not asking to be a prick or prove you wrong, my experience is just limited to my own and haven't had any of the issues you describe.
I can say, because I've read quite a lot of code Dart and Flutter code over the past few months, that my experience does seem to be a newer one. I'm sure up until recently (past year or two) it was probably pretty awful at times because of constant flux and a myriad strangely broken shit.
Right now though, it's fucking great. Let me tell you a story even:
Hokay, so, there is this fucking "null-safety migration" going on and I'm thinking to myself, "oh shit, this is going to be fuckin' awful. Every package has to be updated or it doesn't work. This is gonna end up like Scala 2.11... Heat death of the universe or my obscure flutter dependency updates, which could happen first?"
Turns out, almost zero time, the Dart/Flutter team built a tool to automate it... the tool has a built-in "migration UI" with it to make the process super obvious and easy.
It was so easy, and generally correct, I proceeded to make PRs to add null-safety support to my dependencies because I realized I could do them ALL, myself, with a couple of hours of work.
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What that says to me, is that Google's tooling is pretty fucking mature and that my quality of life is likely to only get better. I have never had an experience even remotely close with anything except Swift and that only works on and for Apple's specific platforms. I'd be worried of Google abandoning it if it wasn't for Flutter and Dart being what Fuchsia uses for its UI.
Writing a desktop app _on_ and for Linux, that works on MacOS, and Windows ... and a web browser is beyond awesome. It'll probably work well on Android and iOS, with little effort, but I haven't even bothered to try yet. Before I add a dependency I will check out the code and run the demos (if there are some). I haven't had one fail or render strangely yet on a Linux desktop and nearly all of the existing packages were originally created/intended for a mobile device.
With web support, I personally have zero reason to ever write a line of JavaScript again. Why would I want to roll all my own basic widgets? I don't. Writing the logic for a performant and interactive list view, in JS and HTML, is woefully boring to me. I want a list view I can give data to and have a meaningful display of my data. I do not want to browse twenty different packages to find a list view that is the right mix of code I don't hate and features I actually want. I want that done because it's a solved problem, and takes time to solve right.
I couldn't be more excited for this release and future ones because Flutter is providing me a solution that fucking works.