For quick scripts I still reach for python or Linux: bash, Windows: AHK. But if I'm developing an app I now reach for Dart/Flutter.
One of their headline libraries, angular dart, pushed out a broken release that stayed broken for nearly a year.
Dart was revived with flutter and I'm glad it's doing better. However, I have trust issues with the way google runs their projects. I simply don't know if they'll continue to support Dart/Flutter or if they'll drop it next year for something shiny.
I also don't appreciate the gaslighting that happened on the dart forums. There was a lot of "Oh, dart isn't dead, we are using it heavily and actively in google!" that happened when dart was very clearly abandoned by google. They pulled the exact same stunt with GWT before replacing it with J2CL.
Dart/Flutter are highly unlikely to be abandoned.
That's the period that left a bad taste in my mouth. IDK who chose to use Dart for flutter, but by doing so they revived a basically dead language.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/25/google-will-not-integrate-...
Sorry you had poor experiences. :-(
That said, it was true that Dart was used heavily internally in that time frame. It was and still is, by Ads (ads.google.com) - that's a non-Flutter Dart app and still (to the best of my knowledge) the largest Dart app around. Before Flutter, we went through a period of primarily prioritizing internal customers. That work was often not visible externally.
We did do the shift to Dart 2 in that time period though. That was a fairly massive change to the language that began independently of Flutter. It was a nice timing that Dart 2 shipped at the same time as Flutter 1.
Let me be blunt, the work was never visible externally. What was visible externally is major language designers leaving the team (Lars Bak), Updates to the language slowing or stopping all together, the chrome team deciding to abandon dartvm in chrome, the angular team deciding to use typescript for angular 2.0, and Dart angular being abandoned (even as it was still being advertised on dart.dev!).
What other conclusion was an outsider to draw other than "Ok, google must be done with dart"?
What was the plan if flutter never happened? Would google ads continue to use dart?
Like I said, happy that you and your team are now enjoying some nice popularity. I jumped on dart early because I thought it was overall a good idea and decent language. However, once bitten, twice shy.
I'm really sorry you got burned by the early experience. It was a hard time for Dart users. It was a hard time on the team too. It felt like we were wandering in the wilderness for a while and struggling to agree on what language our users wanted us to build for them.
I think where we've landed is a much better product, but I'm sorry that our churn getting there caused you pain.
And I really appreciate you saying this. I get that what I'm saying is harsh and probably comes off as whiny/ungrateful. I'm mostly just venting because of the original "Why are people mad about dart in HN" comment and explaining my position there.
Dart does look like it's moving forward in a good direction and I wish it all the best. It's certainly great that the language and ecosystem are seeing a fair bit more adoption.
I was surprised to see Dart 2.0 come out and Dart 3.0 has surprised me even more.
And based on Google's track record, Dart is at risk of being cancelled any day without any notice.
Packages didn't break on Flutter, releases are quite stable and preserve backward compatibility, at least generally.
I can't understand how this can be true when JavaScript/TypeScript exists, but I'm open to religious conversion. Can you share details of the desktop/mobile/web app(s) you've created with Dart?
Another mental block for me is the association with Flutter, since every Flutter app I've tried (iOS and web) feels uncomfortably strange.
A family member was after a bespoke app that would do some calculations for him on site and include pictures and customer details. They wanted it to work on mobile and desktop.
At this point I thought a web or hybrid app would be the way to go. One code base multiple platforms. Cue a month of trying to work out what to use out of an uncountable number of frameworks.
I can't overstate the level of confusion involved it this for a novice like myself! I've created a few simple desktop programs before but nothing on mobile or the web. Where do you start with the current state of things on the web? I still don't know. What I did know was I didn't want to waste time learning a framework that wasn't going to be around, or had just appeared.
At this point I heard of Dart and Flutter which worked across all the platforms I was interested. Not only the it was JIT or AOT when needed, with hot reload.
As for the app, I don't have a GitHub, it's so bespoke to its usecase I don't think anyone would be interested. But also I'd be very embarrassed to release the code. I dread to think how bad it would look to real programmers/developers!
Congrats on overcoming hurdles and delivering a product. Not all professional developers always achieve that.
Each of these layers is public API and follows the same breaking change process as any other part of Flutter's public API, so with a bit of effort an alternative imperative framework could conceivably be built built on top of what's there. The downside is that since the widgets layer is reactive, you'd be giving up all those shiny widgets that are part of the SDK and need to build your own (or find a way to wrap what's in the SDK).
This (old, but still accurate) talk by hixie covers the layers in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkyY9WCGMi0
TL;DR it's entirely possible to create an imperative framework on top of Flutter's lower layers, re-using a lot of our existing code, but (as far as I know) such a thing doesn't exist today.
You can also use AngularDart if you want but it's less common than Flutter Web in my experience.
Flutter on the other hand, for all three targets, it Just Works™.