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Comment by aloukissas | Hacker News Reader

It would be great to see a discussion about using Flutter vs everything else they tried. Same wrt to Vue.

The first version of our web trading platform was written in Angular. It quickly got out of hand in complexity (and we felt Angular had a learning curve that was unwarranted for a frontend lib). The bundle sizes were also big. Then the Angular version fiasco happened. Vue turned out to be far easier to understand and work with, was faster in our benchmarks, and smaller in size.

With Flutter, we initially had a native Android app and a React Native iOS app. Managing two codebases was obviously painful, and React Native had significant performance issues, and we also struggled with the lack of stable libs, and the breaking changes between releases. Flutter came along and we were able to share 90% of the codebase across Android and iOS apps, and were quite happy with 60FPS rendering of native UI.

How did you find writing your apps in Dart when using Flutter? That was one language I haven't been in a rush to learn but the performance metrics you talk about can be quite persuasive.

I've heard a number of people having issues with React Native. I'm curious if that is just an immaturity thing or something more fundamental.

Dart is alright. For being able to use Flutter, it's a fair trade-off.

React Native, it was both. Fundamentally, it uses a JS engine that acts as a bridge, and that can be a performance bottleneck depending on the usecase.

Thanks for the response!

Flutter sounds like a good compromise between Native code (Swift/Kotlin) and React Native then.

If you need high performance but no code sharing - use Native code (Swift/Kotlin)

If you code sharing but okays performance - use React Native

If you need both high performance but code sharing - use Flutter

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