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Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

I'm waiting for Flutter to stop draining the battery. On my Mac, a single TextField with a blinking cursor inside uses somewhere between 10% and 20% CPU. This is a complete show stopper for me.

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Flutter in iOS Simulator will drain my laptop's battery in an hour. It's quite frustrating. Pre-pandemic, I often worked in cafes and libraries and purchased a long power cable to use when I need to work with Flutter and can't get a seat next to an outlet.

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/21445

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/31865#issuecomment...

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/33833#issuecomment...

I think Flutter Team (and most ppl at Google) are entirely focused on pushing out new features which they can cite on their performance review docs to get higher pay. Few of them focus on user needs. This is why Flutter built Web and Desktop support before finishing Mobile. Flutter Mobile things left undone: no high-quality location module, long-standing bug in camera module on Android, missing Cupertino widgets, a few missing Material widgets (date-time picker), critical info missing from docs, and missing non-trivial examples.

Seems with Flutter being open, the growth of flutter outside of mobile was started by others, with it's being picked up by other teams within google and outside of google.

In this podcast, Eric one of the original flutter guys,said desktop and web started by other team with in google. https://twitter.com/darkofabijan/status/1392061926407028740

Teams from Sony, Toyota and Samsung(Tizen) are giving flutter a go on their own. Also the ubuntu guys are active committers to progress flutter desktop.

There must be something else going on that you are not aware of hogging the CPU. This cannot possibly be the source of that.

I wouldn’t discard it so easily - flutter does all drawing and compositing on its own, without using system libraries. Could easily be redrawing the whole screen.

I'm simply observing the CPU usage of the Flutter app when a TextField gets the focus. I don't see why it matters whatever else may be hogging the CPU as well.

I tried it on macOS as well as on the iOS simulator and on the web, but I haven't tried the latest version yet. You can try the web version here:

https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/demo/cupertino-text-field

Edit: I have now tried the latest version (2.2) and I'm seeing 12% CPU usage for an idle app with nothing but a focused TextField.

Just out of curiosity; do you see these while running in profile / release mode?

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