alt Hacker NewsReally bizarre to see all the dogpiling on Flutter/Dart, it's fine. Google isn't giving up on it and we aren't going to suddenly switch to something else. In fact I have no desire to use React Native which the community seems to always point to Expo, a paid tool with metered usage.
My only gripe is that there is no 3D game engine for Flutter, again Dart is great, lots of solid packages like GetX just make the overall development progress as advertised.
People also sleep on the fact that Flutter can do web application and target all 3 desktops and this shit is all free without needing a 3rd party tool like Expo because the RN core experience is lacking and you need to depend on another vendor.
Replies
> lots of solid packages like GetX
I haven't touched flutter in two years, but isn't getX a kitchen sink library disliked by everyone?
Likewise. It took me a while to "get" flutter but now I'm here, I 'aint leaving.
Calling Expo a paid tool with metered usage is just flat out misinformation. You can promote your preferred tech without lying about alternatives.
Expo is a free open source framework that costs absolutely no money to use. You do not need to pay expo any money ever.
Expo Application Services is a set of cloud services that you do not have to use to use Expo. You can set up your own on-prem build infrastructure with fastlane and never use EAS Build. You can self-host your own EAS Updates server. You don't have to use EAS Hosting for web apps. Expo is far less coupled to EAS than Next.js is to Vercel.
Flutter for the web is terrible compared to React Native Web. It's a great way to get your company sued for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. It literally renders to a canvas almost like the Macromedia Flash apps of old. There's also React Strict Dom now which absolutely blows flutter's web support out of the water while still supporting react native: https://facebook.github.io/react-strict-dom/
I just looked up an example flutter web app and it's completely invisible to the screen reader when I enable VoiceOver: https://flokk.app/#/ . The screen reader literally announces 'web content is empty'. You can't even select text to copy it!
Also, as far as integrations with game engines:
https://github.com/calico-games/react-native-godot
If you want complex 2D graphics like you can do with flutter, react native can also use the Skia rendering engine just like flutter with react-native-skia.
> My only gripe is that there is no 3D game engine for Flutter, again Dart is great, lots of solid packages like GetX just make the overall development progress as advertised.
Yeah they're going to work on 3D afterwards (potentially, the main dev for 3D left the Flutter team and is back on Android if I recall correctly), it's not a huge priority right now. Also, it's not recommended to use GetX, there are some issues with it, a major one being it's like a framework within a framework, and it essentially rewrites a lot of Flutter. Better to use Riverpod, Bloc, Signals, ReArch or something else.
For 3D however, I've been looking at Dioxus which is in Rust, they're making a native renderer the same as Flutter (ie not webviews) called Blitz, and they're making good progress on the mobile side. This renderer can embed Bevy, a game engine also written in Rust, and Bevy can also embed Dioxus native, which I thought was really cool, it's bidirectional embedding.
I didn't know Expo explicitly made you pay, I thought it was only optional. Now that I look at it, seems like it's for high priority builds but still, can't we just build on our own servers? If not then that's a big con, I don't want to rely on an external service just to build my app.
What are you making in Flutter?