Posted by absqueued 12 hours ago
I've used this for a fairly complex app at work and it's great. (It's certainly not vibe coded as one commenter suggested.) It's a Python layer on top of Flutter, and it was the only UI framework I could find for Python that was fast and worked on all major desktop and mobile OSs. I think maybe Kivy could too but it seemed like it would be an uphill struggle for a good desktop app.
It's a bit of a gateway drug for pure Flutter. If you need some complex, quickly updating control then you can write a Flutter control (in Dart) and wrap it in a Flet (for Python) control for better performance than doing it all in Python. I've ended up doing that for the main display in our app, and there's always the option to move more and more business logic into that.
One downside to Flet is that I wish they didn't try "fix" some design decisions in Flutter. For example, they have a Flet "Container" widget that wraps a bunch of different Flutter layout widgets. The Flet version does seem easier to understand to me, but there's just so much more documentation (and StackOverflow answers etc.) for Flutter than for Flet that it would be easier overall if they just mirrored the Flutter controls precisely.
Also in the era of AI, sharing native code is easier than ever, just compile down to WASM for the web and for the other binary.
I believe Python has done more harm than good to the industry.
Its by nature very inefficient, it leads you in the direction to some very poor abstractions (inheritance, monkey patching, mixins etc) and as a result code that is very prone to subtle bugs and issues.
It deserves all the love it gets as an approachable language, but it deserves a lot more flack for everything else.
The good parts are that the inbuilt data structures and their apis are efficient and clean enough to write code that's mostly readable. Most of the heavy lifting is done in hand tuned C and performance intensive external modules are also written in C. There are several good projects that are written using it and while it's not theoretically perfect, it's useful enough. Like Stroustrup said - there are 2 kinds of the languages, ones that everyone complains about and ones that no one uses.
The bad parts are that it's very easy to use. Almost in a Visual Basic "producing crap just takes a squeeze" kind of way. It opened up programming to a lot of people (the genesis of Python was in the CP4E project - where this was the aim). This resulted in a lot of bad patterns, inefficient code, badly written but popular libraries. Also, the indentation idiom and other restrictions resulted in a lot of convoluted APIs.There's also a lot of baggage from the pre multi-core CPU era (threading etc.).
I still think of it as a great glue language. If there are libraries that are fast and can run well, a good FFI or wrapper which Python can leverage will amplify the reach and usability of the library.
On the overall, a language that's older than the venerable Java which people are still using (and hence complaining about) speaks to its longevity. So, atleast by that definition, it is successful.
Starting with version 5, Visual Basic "crap" was using the same compiler backend as Visual C++.
PS: Loved your website's (https://ben.church/) messaging for different audiences. Especially the "My Wife" one. Gave me a good laugh. :)
But it's soooooo slow, tooling was abysmal until uv came on the scene (which some people still don't use), it has a ton of old janky APIs, and features like implicit bool coercion.
I wish there was a popular scripting language that was good. Modern robust semantics, infinite precision integers, static typing, good tooling, easy to embed. As far as I can tell it doesn't exist. Roto is the closest I've seen but it's moderately domain specific and doesn't have arbitrary precision integers.
Is it because it's clichéd? That doesn't matter so long as it gets the point across.
Is it because you object to having desktop applications that do a simple task like this? I remember when simple single-purpose desktop apps were common e.g. Card File in Windows 3.1. Also this is meant to be an example for both desktop and mobile. Are only SPA web pages allowed to do things like this now? What a depressing world if so.
Or is your comment satire? I honestly can't tell.
Edit: What would you allow as a first example of a new UI toolkit. (Not that Flet is new, it's had plenty of 0.x releases.)
- Cross platform frameworks are starting to become an anti pattern these days
- Hello world examples are losing relevance when I'm not the one writing code
- A To Do list is just the absolute least impressive thing you can showcase
From a marketing perspective, I want to showcase something that other frameworks cannot do and "this only took 10 lines of Python code" is a very weak sales pitch in 2026.
No clue why it's being done here.
The problem is I don’t want to use Python for everything that bad. If I’m going to reach for a cross platform toolkit these days, I’m personally going to reach for Tauri. Could be useful if you’re really married to Python I suppose.
To paraphrase you: "no one should release new open source software libraries because it is not enterprise ready on day one with thousands of deployments and every feature imaginable".
If you don't want to use it, don't use it
To paraphrase you: “if you have objective reasons preventing you from adopting the code then keep them to yourself because I concluded they’re bad vibes”.
I have never written web app with Flutter so this caught me by surprise.