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They do say "Flutter is a great way to build Chrome OS apps" and they say "Because Chrome OS runs Android apps, targeting Android is the way to build Chrome OS apps."

The article is about chromeos and flutter, to make it clearer, they could have said, "targeting Android is the way to build, Flutter, Chrome OS apps."

Targeting Android to create Flutter chromeos apps currently seems to be the go, this may change once flutter for the web and or the linux desktop support is fully baked.

I'm interested to try flutter out on chromeos, I might get a chromebox, the acer and hp i5 U series are the recommended ones for Android development. Developing flutter without the need for a simulator or a phone connected via usb, is cool. Maybe the next step is develope android flutter apps on android.

With regards PWAs, maybe more so on mobile, flutter apps are AOT, Ahead Of Time, compiled for release so they should have better start up times than apps that run on a vm.

The flutter wiki has stuff on the diffent modes. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Flutter%27s-modes

Debug mode "Optimizes for fast develop/run cycles." runs on the Dart VM and allows for statefull hot reload.

They are working on it, you can check the wiki/Desktop-shells link below for progress.

https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Desktop-shells

they say -

"Work is ongoing to extend Flutter to support desktop as a target environment, allowing developers to create macOS, Windows, and Linux applications with Flutter"

The chrome guys who started the sky experiment, now flutter, used JavaScript for the first few iterations. I think they went with Dart because they were able to get the Dart GC customised for flutter. The big feature that the Flutter team got from Dart, that they didn't know they wanted, was stateful hot reload.

Seems being able to build UIs with hot reload feature is a winner.

Norbert's experiment, looking at building an editor in flutter, looks very cool. As he says it a lot of work building everything from scratch, but starting with a widget editor is a cool idea.

The concept, in flutter, of every thing being a widget, even the app itself, is very powerful.

I agree, time will tell, with people like Norbert, who are outside of google, I'm interested to see what they and Google do with flutter this year.

With regards Flutter, keen to see it come to the desktop, there are some experiments. https://github.com/Norbert515/flutter_ide

Like a game engine, Flutter draws every pixel, compiles to native arm code, so you can create a custom design across android and ios or use the supplied material design and ios widgets.

Also they had an event in London last month, if you don't know much about flutter, there is this 11 minute recap of that event. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-o4BqJxmJE

Interesting thing is Flutter was started as an experiment by guys on the chrome team, Ian Hickson, co-editor of the CSS 2.1 spec, works on Flutter as a TL. An aim of the Flutter team is to improve the developer experience.

Google uses a design pattern to helps to separate presentation from business logic, this allows them to share code across flutter and the web. https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/bloc

Here is the design bit from Flutter 1.0 live stream. https://youtu.be/NQ5HVyqg1Qc?t=5940

Their website has some tutorials https://flutter.io/docs/reference/tutorials

and it has a getting started for mobile and web devs https://flutter.io/docs/get-started/flutter-for/android-devs

Also you can play with some dart code on a web page at https://dartpad.dartlang.org/

They have started a "Dart FFI project" https://gist.github.com/mraleph/2582b57737711da40262fad71215...

Michael Thomsen's Coldfront talk is up on youtube,

https://youtu.be/sl5TaN7EwjQ

Going with Dart gave flutter - complied to machine code - fast GC - stateful Hotreload, a feature of the Dart vm use in dev builds.

My understanding is Dart originally started out with a vm along with a Dart-to-JavaScript compiler. The Dart team was also doing their own experiments in the iot and ios space.

Flutter, at that time it was call the Sky project/experiment, looked at several languages before give dart a go.

Apple only allows their JS VM on ios.

The nature of flutter, creating and discard many objects per frame, required a fast GC.

The hotreload feature was one the Flutter team didn't know they wanted, it was a suggestion from the Dart team.

So the Dart Team was able to meet flutters needs of creating a fast GC and being able to be compiled to machine code for ios and android as well.

Hey I've been following Dartlang's up and downs over the years, here are some ramblings about Flutter.

When the chrome guys started the Sky experiment, now the flutter project, they started with javascript. I don't know why they dropped javascript, but they looked at several languages before trying Dart. Here is a floss weekly episode with one of the co-founders, talks about flutter's hotreload, an idea that came from the Dart team.

https://youtu.be/2C-2-tU6LLY?t=22m19s

If swift was opensource back then they may have gone with it and if they started today they may have gone with kotlin native.

Flutter's hotreload feature, something that they didn't know they wanted, was created after they decided to give Dart a go. While the Dart team had missed the boat on getting the Dart VM into chrome, they still had their internal customers using Dart2JS. The Dart team also had their own experiments in IOT and running on IOS.

Maybe Sky/Flutter guys saw Dart solving their problems that Javascript couldn't and they also saw that the Dart team has the expertise to help them in advancing their experiment to where it is today.

Some dart ramblings. Seems to me, that the Chrome team is responsible for Dart demise and its later flutter inspired resurgent.

Flutter was started by people in the chrome team, as an experimental project called sky.

With regards to making it possible to include the dart vm the oilpan project was started.

Oilpan, the replacement of reference counting in Blink, with a tracing garbage collector, this would have made it possible for dart vm to sit along side v8 in chrome.

Oilpan was started in 2013 and instead of taking months, it took years, I think it finally arrived in 2016. Here is a dart video from io 2013 announcing oilpan. https://youtu.be/huawCRlo9H4

With chromeos support for android apps, I wonder if a chromebox, that has android support, could fire up a futter/android app in kiosk mode.

Maybe it's possible to do with a pc running chromium os.

I posted this earlier, I think accessibility was a requirement for an internal google flutter app, have you had a chance to look at https://flutter.io/accessibility/

I think accessibility was a requirement for an internal google flutter app, have you had a chance to look at https://flutter.io/accessibility/

Here is an article on why flutter uses dart. https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf

Some tidbits from what I've read, etc, about Flutter -

They moved to Dart from JavaScript three years ago, after looking at dozen of other languages.

One of the flutter guys posted, the other day, that he had very poor opinion about Dart, just like the rest of the web, until he tried it.

The dev build are JIT and has sub second stateful hot reload feature, which came from Dart. Release build compiles to native code.

I think the sub second hot reload feature, makes it cool. Have a look at the "Unified layout" section in https://hackernoon.com/why-flutter-uses-dart-dd635a054ebf and or install the flutter plugin in vs code or android studio and have a play.

Fuchsia docs says POSIX lite and Web runtime, under Backwards compatibility. More info at https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/HEAD/book.md#zircon-... You can fire up the fuchsia in qemu, as it requires hardware graphics, you can't run the desktop, but you can have multiple shell open. I've had a play and it has vim and sql_shell and a bare bones top.

>Fuchsia will be using Dart instead of Java

The current sysui is flutter/dart based, Flutter is google's newish mobile app sdk, the guys who started it have work on the chrome team, it's in alpha and has support android and ios.

https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/sysui "Armadillo is currently the default system UI for Fuchsia. Armadillo is written in Flutter"

Here is an example of a rust programme, Xi editor, using flutter for the ui. https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/xi

Fuchsia can display web content, it has a web view that currently webkit based not chrome/blink. I think the plan is to use chrome/chromium web browser, once/if arrives in fuchsia,that will be interesting.

I've had a play with Fuchsia via qemu on linux and it has web_view so can display webpages, don't know when or if chrome web browser will arrive. Fuschia book say it has Backwards compatibility, POSIX lite and Web runtime https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/HEAD/book.md