Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

I gave up and started using Flutter with flutter_rust_bridge for business logic. I'm convinced that UI development from scratch simply cannot happen without a large company backing the project, giving it time and money. Flutter took over ten years and likely millions of dollars. HTML, CSS, and JS / TS? Likely billions.

This is because simply building the UI toolkit itself is usually not a prime motivator for a startup, they want to work on their differentiating features, not on reinventing the wheel. Of course, if the startup is a text editor or other such UI heavy app, then it may make sense to reinvent the UI wheel. Figma showed this successfully, and perhaps Zed and Warp might, too.

Oh, flutter + rust seems like a great combo. (Because Flutter seems great for UI work, but Dart is very meh for everything else.) Have you tried Tauri or some other Electron-like alternative by any chance? How do you like Flutter+Rust so far, and what's your "baseline"? :)

I too am interested in the flutter aspect, but I just recently worked with Tauri as part of a rewrite project and it was a decent experience. There are still some rough edges and small gaps, but overall it’s pretty well done. Plus, when you’re ready to ship your app, they give you tools that make packaging and code-signing very easy. I would recommend it if you have any interest in it.

Compare this to my experience with iced, where I discovered that I love the elm architecture, but dealing with the UI parts became exponentially more complex the larger it grew, so many undocumented or under documented components, plus upgrading between minor versions would cause breaking changes that weren’t always easy to solve because of the lack of documentation or examples.

I like Flutter and Rust, it's pretty nice. I actually like Dart as well, it has some very interesting features. I've used Electron and Tauri a bit before but I didn't like that it still wasn't "native," it still used a web wrapper.

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