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Comment by devxpy | Hacker News Reader

The promise of flutter is alive!

https://web.dahliaos.io/#/

This has the power to accelerate flutter desktop development in general. Really excited for both these projects.

I opened the link. The only thing spoken to my screen reader was "enable accessibility". I pressed the button (it didn't accept space bar, but only enter) and it just announced an empty page.

I can't speak to the qualities of the os, but hopefully this won't be the entire a11y experience both on the website and on the os itself if both use flutter.

Yes, this is the kind of things I expect to get better if the tech gets more exposure. If it doesn't then we'll be surely stuck with half-assed solutions for a truly cross-platform dev experience...

Yeah, sorry about the performance. We kinda put that together as an impromptu web demo, like the old ubuntu tour. Flutter for the web is super sucky right now, and lacks a lot of things like accessibility and normal text interaction because it is backed by a canvas element. Ideally as Flutter matures we will be able to improve both the performance and accessibility aspect of it.

I'll try to evaluate it fairly when it matures some more.

FYI I get a blank page when I visit <https://web.dahliaos.io/>.

I see two instances of "Uncaught Error: undefined" in the JS console. Strangely, in a different session I instead see "NoSuchMethodError: J.aH(...) is null" and the empty page has a gray background instead of white. I get similar results in both Firefox 81 and Safari 14 on macOS 10.15. Let me know if you want more info.

There currently is a bug with the localization at the moment. we are working to correct it but it seems to be quite a bug lol

I only see a completely grey page with no content or anything at all, so it doesn't sound like it's just a a11y issue.

Desktop environment made in JS? Hell will freeze before I will use such crap with material feel on it. ;)

It looks like Flutter compiled for the web.

yikes I can't imagine writing all that in JS

So ChromeOS?

Bit of a fun fact, chrome OS is mostly C++ for the GUI.

Indeed, but that isn't what developers get to play with in userspace.

I guess not yet on browsers like Firefox.

On Firefox, its struggling to keep this page alive such that the browser controls are locking everything up. I don't think its quite ready yet if browsers can't keep up with correctly rendering websites using Flutter.

That might just be the app, try -https://web.dara.network/ ?

It is a bit of a mess. It really shouldn't be able to run online, it just happens to be possible, so we decided to put it up. Flutter really isn't quite mature enough for production on the web, (Partially our fault for a decently messy codebase, a rewrite is underway to maximise efficiency).

Not sure if this is sarcasm, but I only see a blank page on that link.

Do you have an example of a complicated code base that uses flutter? I've never seen an interface designed with it that makes me think "wow. Great interface.", let alone the feeling that it can handle the functionality I would port to it.

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