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Comment by TheMagicHorsey | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Shopify did their homework and looked at Flutter. Flutter seems to meet their objectives more than React Native does.

And as an added bonus, Flutter is easier to reason about, has edit and continue, and is more performant.

Perhaps the use of Dart instead of Javascript was a deal killer though?

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It would be pants-on-head insane for a company like Shopify to go all-in on Flutter. Is Flutter going to be around 10 years from now? Can Shopify support Flutter on their own if nobody else is using it 10 years from now? I don't mean that technically the license would allow them to, but can they in practice field the manpower and skills to do so across all the platforms they need.

I don’t know much about RN or Flutter; but why is it “insane” that flutter cant exist in 10 years but RN will still be king?

Why can’t RN die within 10 years? Because it’s been around since 2013 vs 2017? Because you like one more than the other?

I have concerns about Google’s commitment to Dart/Flutter, but I’m not sure one scenario is pants on head insane and the other just fact.

React Native could very well fall out of favor in the next 10 years, but the amount of companies using it today means there is a sufficient base to share the maintenance burden with, of which Shopify could potentially carry a large amount because of the significant overlap with the rest of their tech stack. If Google becomes disinterested in Dart, could Shopify step up and maintain it? Seems unlikely, and why on Earth would they want to, it's nowhere close to the rest of their competencies?

If for one technology you can extrapolate from today out to the next several years at least, and the other's path is effectively entirely opaque and at the whim of another party, it's a company-killer level risk to bet on the latter. Put it this way, if Google drops Dart/Flutter tomorrow, Google will be just fine as they have very little skin in the game so to speak. Technical reasons one way or another are completely overshadowed by the business risks, as the landscape is today (which will change over the years, but Shopify is making their decision today).

Not to be TOO snarky but... I'm sure there are a whole bunch of Angular 1.0 people who said the same thing.

I'm not convinced it's a worse idea to guess lottery numbers than to guess what will be successful languages. To that point however, React isn't a language (or a framework) it's a library.

I would say Google has more to lose by dropping Dart and Flutter as a language and frame work than Facebook has/had by dropping React.

I don't see how it's any crazier than publicly declaring React Native as their future like this.

With React Native, you're betting on a framework. With Flutter, you're betting on both a framework and a new language. Flutter also works on a much lower level than RN, which means it would be harder for them to pick up the development if the need should arise.

Dart is something very similar to Java, not much of a bet to jump into it. Moreover, it has type soundness, something Typescript cannot achieve.

I'm not so sure it would be easy to continue RN core development either. From what I see even just upgrading the JS engine from an ancient version was a major hassle for the core team.

In RN there's simply more moving parts. You work with 3 package managers at the same time, possibly even 3 languages. At least at this stage Flutter just seems overall more productive for the developer.

Alibaba, Google, Tencent, Capitol One, Square, Baidu, New York Times, and many other large companies have projects on Flutter.

And that's not counting the small startups. There are countless ones of those too.

They talk about looking at flutter in the article.

They use the word once to say “we did a deep dive”. It’s never mentioned again.

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