I was recently tasked to build a mobile app at my work, that would have maybe 5% of the feature-set of our gargantuan web product. However, this 5% was mission critical. Coming from React-TS, building with Flutter was a bit weird at first (where's my CSS???) but the productivity gains came quickly. The Pub ecosystem is fairly mature, in that all the third party packages are pretty high quality and address most common use cases. Unlike npm where there are 10+ solutions for the same problem, there will only be one - maybe 2 in Flutter land.
I was very pleased to find out, that Flutter supported web as well. Now, it's not as good as mobile yet - some of the animations are render blocked by the JS main thread - but it is a very nice 'middle' solution to somebody who needs to use the app who doesn't have iOS or Android (for example, Surface tablet). Also great for internal testing - push up the latest changes to a dev web environment, and everyone can test without installing APKs or using TestFlight.
In my use case, I was actively discouraged against making something that looked beautiful or pretty - the software is designed to be spartan, minimalist and essential. Flutter is perfect for that.
All in all, Flutter is awesome. Is it the right answer for everything? No. But when you only have one developer to spare whose job it is to build a mobile app, it's perfect for that. The web support is a nice bonus - haven't tried any of the desktop stuff yet.
Dart, as a language, is nice. Not spectacular, but certainly tidier than Java or JavaScript. I've gotten used to functionality programming, so writing everything in classes was jarring at first.
Having used Flutter web in production, I would overall advise against it. It can be brilliant for building forms with elaborate validation logic - and quickly so, but once the site gets heavier and you add more complexity to it, the more issues will pop up. There are still major issues they haven't sorted out yet like occasional odd behavior with input fields and autofocus on Safari etc.
I'm also used to functional programming. The only thing I can not stand about Dart is that types are coupled to classes. If you want to use stateless functions and typed data shapes, you're out of luck. Compare this to TypeScript that truly allows both paradigms and has a very expressive type system.
Doesn’t `typedef` let you specify arbitrary type aliases for pretty much anything in Dart? Or are you talking about something else? For my own curiosity, can you provide an example of Typescript vs Dart in this case?
I was very pleased to find out, that Flutter supported web as well. Now, it's not as good as mobile yet - some of the animations are render blocked by the JS main thread - but it is a very nice 'middle' solution to somebody who needs to use the app who doesn't have iOS or Android (for example, Surface tablet). Also great for internal testing - push up the latest changes to a dev web environment, and everyone can test without installing APKs or using TestFlight.
In my use case, I was actively discouraged against making something that looked beautiful or pretty - the software is designed to be spartan, minimalist and essential. Flutter is perfect for that.
All in all, Flutter is awesome. Is it the right answer for everything? No. But when you only have one developer to spare whose job it is to build a mobile app, it's perfect for that. The web support is a nice bonus - haven't tried any of the desktop stuff yet.
Dart, as a language, is nice. Not spectacular, but certainly tidier than Java or JavaScript. I've gotten used to functionality programming, so writing everything in classes was jarring at first.