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Comment by leppr | Hacker News Reader

Pretty certain it's the unstability.

In my experience, while Flutter may not be elegant because of Dart, it more or less just works.

Developing in React Native is mostly just debugging the framework itself and browsing through React Native Github issues.

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What specifically isn't elegant about Dart in your opinion? Seems like a perfectly good language to me, and although it's nothing fancy, it does have a bit of sugar, and a solid standard library. I also like how codegen and static analysis are so accessible through the build libraries.

It's evolving pretty quickly, too. Non-nullable by default is coming up, along with extension methods, FFI. Possibly implicit conversions.

I've been working with Flutter/Dart for the past 8 months or so, and I have to say...I'm pretty into it.

I think I've been spoiled by algebraic data types and pattern matching. I really miss them.

Non-nullable by default will be a huge win. It does feel like a huge step backwards having to deal with nulls again.

Non-nullable types are coming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5DQRPRBiFI&feature=youtu.be...

The nice thing about React Native compared to Flutter is that RN uses native UI widgets whereas Flutter implements its own rendering system. Flutter engineers basically reinvent a large portion of the work already done by Apple and Google in their UI kits and ultimately you have to rely on them to keep doing that work whenever changes are introduced to iOS and Android UI kits. Since RN uses native widgets they get those updates "for free". There is also the Flutter "uncanny valley" where very subtle but still perceptible differences between the Flutter engine and the native UI kit cause Flutter apps to sometimes feel slightly off. I have especially noticed this on lower end phones where the FPS in Flutter apps sometimes drops and causes the whole UI to feel sluggish in a way that native UI widgets do not.

Wasn't one of the main points with flutter having really good fps?

In my experience it generally does, but on older devices, especially older androids, when the FPS does drop, the entire UI appears to be affected, whereas native widgets seem to perform better, or at least, don't seem to drag down the performance of the entire app UI if one widget is misbehaving.

This has been exactly my experience. I don't particularly like Dart, but as an SDK Flutter is clearly ahead of RN. RN just keeps feeling too fragile. And the tooling is simply not there whereas Flutter has excellent tooling considering how new it is.

wow! I didn't know that. I am currently learning Flutter, because I think it has a strong potential to unify mobile and desktop development, however, I didn't know that React Native was "so bad".

I had the opposite experience with Flutter personally, the problem is that Dart is a niche language with limited exposure (Flutter is basically the only big project in Dart realistically) and it's also a new project as well, it makes a bad combination.

Could you describe your experience more in details? What exactly didn't work out? I would like to know to understand whether it makes sense for me to invest my time in Flutter/Dart instead of a more mature solution like React Native.

Actually, I don't think we should consider React Native more mature. It's been around for longer sure, but it's significantly more fragile, keeps releasing with regressions, has poor tooling around it except for as far as React is concerned etc.

I don't know what you are trying to build on mobile but I'd definitely learn Flutter instead of RN, which I have. Others here have said you should just go full native instead, and they're probably right.

I wasn't aware of the fact that react native is fragile - it seems I did the right choice by learning Flutter. I hope it evolves even better, and also the criticism to Dart for me is so far quite irrelevant, as there are already tons of libraries and it's really easy to learn.

May I ask what kind of stuff are you developing with it? I've been working on a WebRTC app myself with it, basically porting my app from RN to Flutter. So far I've encountered no major obstacles, just a little friction which is a part of the learning curve.

It's an ecommerce app that should integrate with Firebase and online shops. :)

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