> Maybe it's just me but I don't want optional typing, or rather optional type hinting. I want static typing.
A ton of the community (and in particular teams using Dart at Google) felt the same way and the Dart team has been adapting the language to reflect that. Flutter uses Dart 2, which is statically and strongly typed.
> Garbage collection
GC is a nice value-add to the developer — most of us don’t really want to spend a ton of time thinking about reference cycles etc. but as you note, it has the downside of being a potential source of jank. We mitigate this in Flutter by timing the work we do building frames and scheduling small GCs during idle time. Code here: https://github.com/flutter/engine/blob/8109be8e21604df249b87...