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Comment by tarruda | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of a single framework for all platforms and have always wanted to get into Flutter.

Thee main barrier for me has been the Dart language, I wish it was written in a more popular language like Go.

You should give Dart a try, it's a lovely language. and very easy to pick up. In fact, it's become my favorite of the modern languages. For perspective, I come from a primarily Java/C# background, with large smatterings of Python, JS/TS, and Go, not to mention other less popular languages.

I would describe it as C#-lite. It's got all the features of a modern C-derived language with very little of the accumulated complexity. It's got pattern matching, tuple-syntax, a very strong constructor syntax, first class functions (this has become table stakes in the past decade but not so long ago it wasn't)... It's just a well balanced and very pleasant language.

- no threads (isolates are much more limited)

- no value types

- missing fundamental integer types (eg. 64 bit unsigned integer)

- no data classes (records are anonymous)

- no tagged unions

- no static metaprogramming (macros coming soon)

- limited constructors (initializer list expression can't use earlier values in the list, no object initializers)

List<int> is still too often used in APIs instead of Uint8List, even though it has 8x overhead.

Slower than C#, Java, Kotlin & Go. Performance is same as JS (even though it's statically-typed, AOT compiled language).

I'm hardly the Dart Defense Force, so I'm not about to justify all their choices, and I share a lot of your annoyances, especially re: threads, data classes, and tagged unions, but what does people using List<int> have to do with Dart itself? I don't hate on Java-the-language because the libraries are full of BeanFactoryFactory().

Still, I stand by my claim that it's C#-lite.

You can't do List<byte>, but need to use special types like Uint8List. This was not always available, so List<int> is sometimes still used even in official Google libraries. If it had value types you wouldn't need these special lists.

I agree that overall it feels like C#-lite, plus some baggage from early days when it was designed as an alternative to JS.

It will probably become really nice language in a few years.

> Performance is same as JS

Is there a source?

https://github.com/jinyus/related_post_gen

I wrote Dart full time for a couple years at Google (working on Assistant). I really enjoyed it! It's a really nice language, and pretty easy to pick up.

Once you get into it, it becomes clear that Dart is actually pretty brilliant. There are lots of small little features in Dart that makes working with Flutter very productive (and even fun, I would argue).

maybe check out https://flet.dev

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