Posted by rickcarlino 6 days ago
Maybe I'm mis-perceiving - but that's the impression the flutter.dev site gives people.
I've no idea what you mean regarding: "rather than exemplifying its flexibility and adaptability to _your_ platform, programming language etc".
It can produced mobile, web, or desktop apps from the same codebase... Dart and flutter are open source projects supported by Google, like android and go lang.
Seems like you're looking for excuses not to use dart/flutter. That's fine but you could just say you don't want to use them.
Well, that's already a strong barrier to its use. When creating a GUI for an app, the toolkit must offer bindings for the language you're using, it's not you that needs to learn a bespoke language just to use the toolkit.
> It can produced mobile, web, or desktop apps from the same codebase...
That's the thing - not really. It seems it can produce a web or a mobile app while will _run_ on the desktop. But mobile and web apps do _not_ work as desktop apps, nor the other way around; the whole UI/UX language is different... even if some companies try to foist mobile apps onto desktop users.
> That's the thing - not really.
If you were to spend some time learning dart and flutter you'd know this to be false. But I'm not here to change you mind as you've already made it.
Dart is really easy to pick up, it's a beautiful language imho.
Asking honestly, because none of the ones I use is.
The install base would be huge, and it's a solid cross-platform option.
A reasonable TUI can be built without any design or frontend people even looped in.
Collaboration and coordination tend to slow down processes and flatten outputs.
Even in the PC world, the move from DOS based TUI programs to windows GUI in applications like POS was not without some user trauma and insatisfaction.
I was vibe coding a layer on top of textual last week that allows me to plug in both interactive and information display Python functions into a TUI grid. Really simple stuff, with textual doing the heavy lifting.
For people who don't know this version of TUI, it's the ole, "Press 1 for X, Press 2 for Y" kind of interfaces that you use over a phone. Think voicemail text-to-speech and automated speech recognition.
I think this is the primary reason. I feel like whether or not there are good native libraries things were bound to converge into cross-platform preferencing since it's cheaper to produce and maintain.
Seems like it could have gone differently. Feels like the time could be ripe for something like a "declarative gui spec."