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I think that's pretty short-sighted. Dart is hardly an esoteric/niche language like Haskell or Futhark, anyone familiar with Java/Javascript/TypeScript should be able to pick it up in a day or so.

Flutter's performance issues, on the other hand, is a separate story.

> Flutter's performance issues, on the other hand, is a separate story.

Can you expand on that? I know react native has performance issues but does Flutter have it too? Why?

React native has less performance issues, since it uses native toolkit.

Flutter draws whole ui by itself: welcome to blinking cursor that consumes 5-15% CPU in idle.

I don't think that's accurate. Seems like native apps have the best performance but Flutter comes a close second. React native on the other is much slower:

https://medium.com/swlh/flutter-vs-native-vs-react-native-ex...

> welcome to blinking cursor that consumes 5-15% CPU in idle.

Citation? Flutter draws its own UI but game engines do that too.

All code in flutter compiles down to native code.

> React native has less performance issues, since it uses native toolkit.

In theory.

>Citation?

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/59327

This has been a long-standing issue that has completely ruled out Flutter for us. E.g, the Flutterfolio idle login screen uses 14% CPU on my Mac. For a while it sounded like Google was saying that it can't be fixed. But I think they have done some work to address this issue. I'll be very interested in finding out whether it has been fixed in Flutter 3.

I think this might be a bit of an outlier honestly.

Reading the bug report my takeaways were the following:

1. Here is a specific issue we ran into which to be fair is unacceptable in terms of perf but a blinking cursor in an otherwise idle application has crazy high CPU usage numbers trying to run the animations associated with the blinking cursor.

2. They tried the same thing on Linux and CPU usage was 0% so already it appears this is more of a specific mac bug rather than some general widespread thing.

3. Further in the thread a number of potential solutions get mentioned and were under development including just writing a custom shader to handle the blinking cursor (so a solution looks possible)

They just made Mac desktop support stable as of less than 24 hours ago for the first time. None of this strikes me as that egregious. A whole number of major perf improvements have landed since then and it's not even clear if this is still an active problem in Flutter 3.

I think trying to extrapolate this one bug into some widespread disaster scenario is a mistake.

I don't know if there is a larger issue because this show stopping "outlier" has stopped me from exploring Flutter any further. I'll give it another try now that a new major version has been released.

The question in my mind is whether Flutter is consistently and significantly more resource efficient than web technologies for my particular use cases.

Hey there. I'm an engineer working on Flutter Desktop. We're definitely aware of the macOS cursor behaviour issue and are looking at ways we can fix it. We haven't landed anything (that I'm aware of) that should improve this for 3.0, but if it helps, it's something that's actively on our radar and we've discussed potential fixes for. One potential solution is to implement a custom shader [1].

While I understand this may be a dealbreaker issue for your use-case, we've been pretty busy getting a few higher-priority (overall) issues fixed (universal binary support, CJK text input, key event APIs, etc.) prior to 3.0, but we'll get to this.

[1] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/93416

Knowing nothing about Dart, I'd guess learning the language itself is not much of a task, but learning the libraries, build tools, and the whole ecosystem would take a while.

Flutter and Dart seemed to have been internal tools built by engineers looking for an interesting project to spend their time on while at Google.

Kotlin swelled up around the limitations of Java 8 in outside organizations and took over the ecosystem so Android devs could be productive while Google was fighting with Oracle

Java was already open-source at the time so the court fight’s outcome was meaningless from the view of what language to choose.

And Android would have been much better off if they didn’t fork the whole ecosystem and just used OpenJDK, perhaps with an added low-memory GC.

To be fair: Dart is relatively straight forward and simple to learn.

You should have decently qualified developers be productive within a week.

But forcing a new language on people usually doesn't go well.

Sure, I'm not trashing the language, because I know nothing about it.

Our whole dev team is C/C++, with random people who know Python and a few other things. I'm the only one who knows Swift. They're bright people and not hostile toward new ideas, but they're already overtaxed and can't cater to an outlier project written in a language no one knows and built on a framework no one knows.

Speaking from personal experience I found the process of using dart to be VERY painless. I'm mostly a web developer, but have taken some Java courses in college and have dabbled in a bit of C# outside of my normal PHP/JS work.

We decided to take on an app project at work. We had made one using nativescript-vue, but the experience left much to be desired and I wanted to look for alternatives.

A friend had talked favorably about Flutter so I decided to install and check it out. Within a few hours, I had a pretty good looking MVP of the app we were building (it was very basic to begin with). The experience developing a Flutter app was really good.

It felt like I already knew the language from the get go. It worked pretty much as expected. I only had to google things like async/await because dart writes their functions like `(arg) async => expr` while javascript puts the async before the function `async arg => expr`.

YMMV if you're not using the languages which Dart draws inspiration from I guess. But I'dd be surprised if you feel you would need to spend significant amount of time learning Dart.

I wrote extensive amount of Dart without even reading documentation and any prior Dart experience. Knowing dart is never an issue if you know basic Java/Php/JavaScript.

The only thing I really hated about Dart was poor enum support. Now that's fixed.