Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluetidepro | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on their 1.0 launch! I haven't looked too closely at Flutter yet, to be honest. How does it compare to React Native (besides what a basic Google search will yield)? Has anyone jumped ship for either or after trying one of them?

View on HN

Comparison: React Native (and Xamarin, for that matter) use platform-native widgets with JavaScript composing the UI dynamically in the case of React Native (and UI's either dynamically composed or statically compiled with Xamarin -- depends how you build the app). Flutter brings it's own widget layer to iOS and Android (and Fuchsia?) so it's more like starting with a blank 2D graphics canvas and creating your own controls. Advantages: since this rendering layer and widgets are compiled from C++ the performance is excellent. Disadvantage: if you want a widget that isn't in the current set of controls and your C++ skills aren't up to the task, you'll be left wanting to do things you cannot. Not sure what scenarios are affected by this but it's something to keep in mind.

The widgets are written in Dart, not C++. If you need a new widget, you would write it in Dart, which is the same as the application language. This contrasts with React Native, where new widgets/views would be written natively and wrapped in React Native.

I’m going to be a little bit pedantic, but that’s untrue. On React (DOM, Native…) you create your widgets with React, and compose them as components.

If you need to go deeper (for some specific perf issue, usually for animation stuff) then you go native. But it’s a second class approach — well, it has first class support and is not as “second class” as it is for example in Titanium or “completely out of scope” in Cordova.

Parts of React-Native are also written in C++, btw.

I'm guessing most answers will be about Dart being the hard pill to swallow for most, and the fact that it render by drawing UI instead of orchestrating like React Native.

I still prefer RN, and I don't my opinion changing in the future. I prefer controlling a native view for the apps I make. Maybe a game would be easier with Flutter?

Dart compiles to native ARM binary; a colleague of mine who uses C++ for cross-platform mobile development made a demo app in Flutter, decompiled it, and said it looked like what his C++ apps produced. The JavaScript in your React Native apps won't perform as fast.

If you have any experience with TypeScript, Dart isn't that different.

Looks like dart even uses an event loop. Their examples for handling futures look very, very similar to Javascript (and typescript, of course).

https://webdev.dartlang.org/articles/performance/event-loop#...

Reflectly rewrote their app from RN to Flutter: https://medium.com/reflectly-engineering/reflectly-from-reac...

someone did a performance test on android react vs flutter vs native app see https://robots.thoughtbot.com/examining-performance-differen...

The original study fell short on rigor and the author posted an updated version here - https://robots.thoughtbot.com/examining-performance-differen...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com