The type system was verbose yet relatively weak in comparison to something like Typescript, it'd already been rewritten once (which isn't a bad thing), and it was almost unusable outside the platform (I remember trying to write tests for something using sqlite.dart and then realizing that you just... couldn't).
Flutter is an amazing technical achievement, and to some extent so is Dart (there's a great talk from strangeloop about it) but I just... want to be able to use anything but Dart in there. Being able to use Typescript with Flutter would be heaven (JS compatibility was something in early versions of Dart that was removed).
Another thing is Dart is JITed, AOT compiled as well as compiling to JS and WASM. Very few languages can do all 4. JVM ones can't, so no Kotlin (we'll see how well Kotlin Native works), and V8 isn't AOT so no JS or TS either. Only alternative I can think of is Lua.
> Very few languages can do all 4. JVM ones can't
Java can (JIT is trivial, for AOT there is among others Graal, for JS and WASM there is TeaVM (which works on class files, so now that I think about it, pretty much every JVM language can do all platforms), but also the very great Closure compiler (j2cl) which has no relation to cloJure, made and used heavily by google)
With your Java example, that's exactly what I mean, you don't need 4 different tools in Dart to achieve the 4 types of compilation, they're all included in the standard Dart compiler/SDK. Sure, if we go by your definition, probably any language has some level of support for each via various random compilers but I'm talking about something first-class, built-in.
And my specific contrib, Matrix, handles state management and the whole reactive thing pretty well, one area where I see a bit of thrashing in the Flutter community. Check out the examples and esp. the TodoMVC demo, they cover quite a bit of ground.
Then they decided to salvage the team and made flutter with it - the technical reasons of chosing it over JS sound extremely unconvincing. And the language is as you say the worst of both worlds - verbose and weak type system (I remember getting runtime type exceptions because compiler couldn't catch a type mismatch in a ternary) and none of JS dynamism, no reflection - just boilerplate on top of boilerplate.
Worst part is the react like architecture of flutter lends itself really well to immutable state management practices but the language is so weak that any immutable library involves a ton of ugly boilerplate - and they refuse to add stuff like records to the language to ameliorate the problem.
The reason it gets me so riled up to rant is that the framework itself and the idea behind it (custom native rendering framework) has potential - but dart makes using it horrible.
Meanwhile they spent colossal effort and broke half of community packages (including a bunch of first party ones) with null safety. I'd say go for low hanging fruit first.
Because the language is so limited it's impossible to solve this via library, unlike say JavaScript.
90% of the time, it felt like simple IoC plus an app-wide singletons would have been enough for most apps-- trying to get everyone to aadopt BLoC was painful and kinda meh. It's probably just that I never developed a sufficiently big app at scale with lots of devs to see why BLoC was the best way.
That said, I'm also reminded of the Boring Flutter Development Show[2], quite possibly the best produced resource I've ever seen as an intro and ongoing guide to a piece of tech. It is excellent.
[0]: https://www.dbestech.com/tutorials/flutter-bloc-pattern-exam...
[1]: https://www.flutterclutter.dev/flutter/basics/what-is-the-bl...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yr8F2S3Amas&list=PLOU2XLYxms...
The tersest write-up I have on Matrix is of the JS version, and all the demos are CodeSandbox if you want to play: https://tilton.medium.com/simplejx-aweb-un-framework-e9b59c1...
