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Comment by dep_b | Hacker News Reader

So far dealing with stuff like PayKit SwiftUI integration still feels really bad. There's just tons of stuff expecting UIKit and it will take a while before all of that stuff is ported.

SwiftUI is really great, Combine can be hard to get into for people not initiated in Reactive and generally it's as fast to build stuff in as Flutter without dealing with the tragedy called Dart.

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I sometimes wonder why do we continue to get macOS update. Were any of those "user" features really better?

I wish they spend more time looking into Xcode, developer documentation etc. And it is 25M developers at $99 a year. That is $2.5B. And it is looking less than $10M a year investment into Xcode.

For context: I remember hearing the paying developers are a very little fraction of the 25M. I don't pay for it, and I know many people who just created an account to play with the beta releases. I don't think I know anyone who pays the $99. You don't even need to pay this when your app is free. https://developer.apple.com/programs/how-it-works/

What is wrong about Dart? I come from a Kotlin background and I don't see anything wrong with Dart honestly

Failed to take over the Web as Chrome team was driving it, then ChromiumVM got dropped, several key designers like Gilad Bracha and Lars Bak left the project, it was ultimely rescued by AdWords team, which had just migrated away from GWT into Dart, got rebooted into a strong typed language with type inference, and picked up by the Flutter team.

Nowadays it is basically a language to write Flutter applications, hardly worthwhile to bother using it for anything else.

Flutter is taking place on Google politics, while Google lets Flutter, JetPack Composers and PWAs play the game of cross platform GUI frameworks, with the difference that Kotlin and JavaScript/TypeScript have a much broader eco-system than Dart.

In my opinion it's not an especially compelling language (yet maybe it evolves into one) and is useless outside of Flutter. It feels shoehorned into the project because Google wanted to find a use for it. It simultaneously alienates mobile developers and cross platform developers by picking a language neither have experience in and neither can use outside of this one framework. There are people taking about Flutter being to Dart what Rails was to Ruby so maybe time will tell. Flutter itself seems decent though, despite a few oddities.

The compile time guarantees could have been much better, especially around null pointers. Now they're hacking in non-nullability the same broken way they did it in Java. Same goes for a lot of things like switch / case statements requiring breaks but not supporting checks for covering all cases compile time.

In general it just feels like old Java spiced up with some Javascript niceties like Futures and a nice constructor syntax.

But you should've noticed that coming from Kotlin?

Why wouldn't they use Kotlin as most mobile developers are already used to it?

> especially around null pointers. Now they're hacking in non-nullability the same broken way they did it in Java

Typescript was my first introduction to a typed language and it astonishs me the decisions made in the 'earlier days' regarding nullability.

I'm curious what you have against Dart?

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