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0 pointskrzat8y ago0 comments

Flutter is a lot like Electron, but faster. Also, arguably easier to use. They don't have to support all of the backward compability garbage that HTML/js has.

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LeoNatan258y ago· 2 in thread

qt, gtk and Xamarin / Mono are also "like" Electron but faster and easier to use. Why is the Google fad somehow more important or impressive than those already proven technologies?

krzatOP8y ago

Popularity of Electron proves that they are not easier. Even Microsoft wrote VS Code in it.

I don't care much about Google but they did pretty good job with Flutter:

1. No special designer needed, you do everything in code. That means everyone can use their preferred editor.

2. Hot reload - you change something and it changes in the running app.

3. Headless testing - No need to own iOS/Android device to test iOS/Android UI.

4. Nice tooling - autocompletion, formatting, etc. Everything done via command line, with optional support for IDE.

5. Extensible - very easy to write your own widgets. There is nothing special about provided components.

6. Platform agnostic - "native look" of Qt/GTK is a lie, they still look off. To me it just triggers uncanny valley vibe. Not to mention that they implement native look from 5 years ago or more. And completely useless on mobiles. Flutter looks the same on every platform unless specified otherwise. Way less platform specific bugs.

LeoNatan258y ago

Electron is popular because web "developers" can't be arsed to learn anything other than JS. It's as simple as that. They live in the lie they tell themselves that JS development is easy, when it really isn't, tooling is disastrous, IDE is nonexistent, apps look bad, etc. They are just happy they manage to run something "desktop".

All those things you mentioned are true of Xamarin.

qt uses actual native controls, so not sure what is a "lie" about it; if something is not behaving correctly, it's a bug, and you open an issue. GTK does look bad and out of place, I agree with that, bug so does Electron. If it's between GTK and Electron, I'll take a proper GTK application.

Looks the same = looks bad on all platforms.

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