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Google lays off staff from Flutter, Dart and Python teams weeks before its developer conference | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 90 points 2 years ago (41 children)

Disinvestment into Python, Flutter, and Dart is a clear signal that those tools are unimportant to Google. I won't be recommending that anyone use Dart or Flutter on new projects.

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  • [–] 55 points 2 years ago (19 children)

    You shouldn't have ever been recommending dart or flutter.

    Python ain't going anywhere tho

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago* (17 children)

    You shouldn’t have ever been recommending dart or flutter.

    Why not?

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (14 children)

    I'm mostly just biased because I do native mobile development but flutter has always seemed like a false economy to me. You're trying to build cross platform but it'll take more than 2x as long as building each platform to get the same quality of experience. So either you have a shittier experience or you take even longer than true native dev.

    But I'm obviously very biased here.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    I've used it before and it's got it's pros and cons. Ultimately the big thing is not all apps need to be the "killer app". Some apps are pretty simple, so a one size fits all can be nice. It's definitely not the same as developing natively, but for small teams/apps it's not too bad.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    If you're prioritizing cost, you should probably already be building a web application imo. There's very few cases where I would recommend cheaping out and building a native app, it's just kind of unsound.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    If you're prioritizing cost, you should probably already be building a web application imo. There's very few cases where I would recommend cheaping out and building a native app, it's just kind of unsound.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    If you're prioritizing cost, you should probably already be building a web application imo. There's very few cases where I would recommend cheaping out and building a native app, it's just kind of unsound.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    If you're prioritizing cost, you should probably already be building a web application imo. There's very few cases where I would recommend cheaping out and building a native app, it's just kind of unsound.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    If you're prioritizing cost, you should probably already be building a web application imo. There's very few cases where I would recommend cheaping out and building a native app, it's just kind of unsound.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

    It looks like your reply got submitted multiple times.

    I agree with you now about preference for web apps, but that was not the case when Google started pushing Flutter.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Looks like my Lemmy-client of choice did some retrying when I had poor connection, sorry about that.

    I think trying to go cheap on native apps was always kind of a fool's errand, tbh. Cordova, Xamarin, React Native and so on - all pretty sub-par solutions leading to poor experience without actually materializing the desired savings.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Looks like my Lemmy-client of choice did some retrying when I had poor connection, sorry about that.

    I think trying to go cheap on native apps was always kind of a fool's errand, tbh. Cordova, Xamarin, React Native and so on - all pretty sub-par solutions leading to poor experience without actually materializing the desired savings.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Looks like my Lemmy-client of choice did some retrying when I had poor connection, sorry about that.

    I think trying to go cheap on native apps was always kind of a fool's errand, tbh. Cordova, Xamarin, React Native and so on - all pretty sub-par solutions leading to poor experience without actually materializing the desired savings.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    If you're prioritizing cost, you should probably already be building a web application imo. There's very few cases where I would recommend cheaping out and building a native app, it's just kind of unsound.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Flutter can be socialized for mobile OR desktop OR web. Having all three in a codebase requires lots of code and alternative layouts to properly handle each platform. It's not a "one size fits all" solution, actually to the absolute contrary it's a solution that you have to tailor to the UI you want to build.

    I'm making desktop apps with Flutter (it's awesome) and my apps can't ever possibly hope to run on mobile. I'd have to remake most of the damn thing in order to make layouts for mobile.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Right but instead of a toy language there's Kotlin which is already multiplatform.

    I just struggle to see why another language needed to be invented to do this.

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    Has anyone used Dart the past decade?

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  • [+] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It was originally meant as a better JavaScript and it was. It failed when none of the other browsers expressed interest in supporting it. It languished for a while and then was taken up by the Flutter team. At the time Flutter took it up it was somewhere around the level of Java 8 in features but not quite on par. Since then it’s seen some massive improvements to the type system and language. It’s completely null sound, not just null safe like Kotlin. It recently got records/tuples and one of the more capable pattern matching syntaxes I’ve ever seen in a functional imperative hybrid language. The next stable version of dart will introduce a compiler macro system that is very promising. The syntax isn’t always the prettiest due to it trying to not totally break old code. I do think that it offers a wide range of modern language features that competes heavily with Swift and Kotlin in the mobile space.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Just had to look at it out of curiosity and man, it looks like yet another C+=1. The code samples on Wikipedia contain one of those gaudy for-loops and a ternary, as if that was still peak language design four decades after C got published.

    But what I seriously don't get: Why the hell did they develop Go then? That's yet another C+=1, with even some design similarities to Dart, e.g. it's garbage-collected but compiles to machine code.
    Like, yeah, it wouldn't be the first time that different teams develop competing products at Google, but what kind of culture leads to there even being demand for two C+=1s?

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  • [+] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    If you have the freedom try Typescript.

    The tsx files are almost identical to jsx except for the need to define the field types your ingesting.

    While thats a little extra work, it allows Visual Studio Code to perform deeper analysis and provide much more helpful contextual hints.

    I grew to love JSX and tried TSX out of interest and you couldn't convince to go back to pure JS

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I won't be recommending that anyone use Dart or Flutter on new projects.

    You seem to think Google cares at all. Android has been languishing and Flutter is lightyears ahead. KMP is junk compared to what Flutter has accomplished with a fraction of the bells and whistles.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You seem to think Google cares at all.

    Odd conclusion to draw. I'm simply not inclined to recommend tools that are not going to be supported by the organization that created them. Development ecosystems are important when planning a project.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    What I mean to say is that Google isn't invested in native android either. It's been repeatedly strip mined by first-timers looking for a quick promotion and left to burn.

    Things got so bad that Google gave up on native Views and created Jetpack Compose, which has been a source of many complaints related to performance.

    In 2024 Flutter has instant hot-reload, and the "native" (but 100% bundled) solution still requires a complete reinstall on the device. In fact, Dart can compile to native code (or JIT) without an issue, yet Kotlin Native is barely in GA in the new compiler support has been lagging while the new compiler isn't out of beta and is still poorly supported by tooling.

    Consider the absurdity: React Native is the only true native framework out of RN, Jetpack Compose, and Flutter. And all of this barely scratches the surface of the tooling problems that Flutter 99% avoids by allowing development on desktop, web or iOS simulator.

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  • [+] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I'm not sure how cononical is connected to this.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    they pledged to adopt flutter heavily in ubuntu's apps, in partnership with google. they even took like a couple cycles to port their entire installer and snap store to it.

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