Flutter Heroes

New post on /r/flutterdev subreddit:

My thoughts on Flutter after using it for a month
I've spent the past month working on converting a JS app to Flutter (Android/Web) and I can't say it was a pleasant experience. The promise of Flutter is incredible, one codebase for everything, but it's just not there yet.Dart I can't talk about Flutter without talking about Dart. I was using TypeScript in JS land, and I was looking to Dart's typing being enforced by default and the wonderful analysis tools. The analysis tools were disappointing (see dev tools section), and the typing ended up being less useful than I hoped. Dart showed me that I took for granted the automatic JSON conversion JS does, and every model forced me (unless I wanted to do code gen) to write my own JSON parsers. This started out as a "hey, this will give me a lot of control!" to quickly turned into minutia. The fact that you end dealing with a ton of Map<String, dynamic> basically throws the typing system out the window, at least in JS land I can set the types for properties independently. Additionally, I missed the union types of JS (string | int).Dev tools I thought the Flutter and Dart ecosystem tooling would be unified and comprehensive, but what I got was a half baked ecosystem--conflicting styleguides, poor linting rules, and dev tools that only worked on VS Code and IntelliJ. <code>flutter run</code> cannot be ran from a container, and there is no in-built way to do hot reloading (unless you're using a blessed text editor). Also, hot reloading takes forever to compile and update, even for web. Not sure if this scales with the size of the app or not, I hope not. The Dev Tools inspection page was quite comprehensive though, and it provided a lot of useful information when debugging components and layouts.Routing Coming from JS, I can't believe how bad routing is. The navigator paradigm of pushing/popping a stack of views is appealing, but when you start digging into advanced routing (query parameters on web, deep linking, linking to websites outside of your app) shit gets bad, fast, with weird hacks to make it work on one platform vs the other.Flutter Web Speaking of making stuff work on one platform, the way the <code>dart:html</code> package works creates a ton of useless boilerplate. Anytime you include that package, you have to refactor the entire thing into a conditionally exported package. It forces you to isolate any of the web stuff, for good or for bad, and it makes testing a nightmare. The bundle size has already been discussed to death, but you really feel it when you're developing--your network screen is FILLED with random JS libraries. There is also no way to inspect your app using traditional dev tools in the browser. Instead, you're supposed to use the dev tools website and inspect everything from there.Testing This was one area that I think Flutter provided a lot of useful functionality out of the box. Jest is great, but Flutter's testing suite is very impressive. The integration testing framework is really slick for "clicking" around things, and it was a pleasure to use.State Managing state in your Flutter app is really bizarre, especially figuring out what will cause a redraw (or possibly even an accidental API call!). There are multiple ways to manage state, and none of them were an easy transition from something like Redux (even the official redux state plugin). Widgets and FutureBuilders are very confusing, and I really struggled with doing API calls and reactive programming after a widget has been built.Material One of the huge benefits of Flutter (to me) was the ability to have all of the components premade with comprehensive tweaks to style the app as I see fit. It ended up definitely being comprehensive, but the documentation was awful. I constantly had to experiment with properties to figure out what they mean…

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