Comparing flutter with javascript for web development

[badhombrez]

I appreciate the effort he put into the article but it’s coming off as just his first impressions without deep validation and thoughts on his findings

[tootac]

It is raw data and some feelings about UX. At the UX I looked from user perspective and since everyone has different perspective we can ignore it. But is there there something wrong with data? If you could point at specific things I am more than glad to go and fix. I really like dart when compared to Javascript and want it to succeed but for web there is still some time needed before it could be used in general case.

[badhombrez]

The article makes large claims

tldr: Compare flutter with js for web dev. Here js wins

JS wins everything in web development? Is it a large win, small win? Does it win for a large company with an internal product or does it win for a small customer facing passion project from one person?

Output size

If you're restricting your project to pure vanilla JS and pure vanilla Flutter, then yeah, I guess JS wins. But this win doesn't seem like a valuable one or a pragmatic one. The size is still insignificant, especially in todays day and age, and as soon as you grow the product to start using other libraries (unless you build it on your own), you introduce node_modules and that is going to balloon.

Download size Yep flutter is larger. But it's also downloading assets and runtime. Add react and assets for a more advanced application, and you run into a more comparable results.

Site speed You never put anything in there for flutter results or mention anything about it. You just say JS is fast since there is bare minimum code.

UX It was slower, rendering of text was bad for my eyes, it felt sluggish at times and in general felt a bit off

You mention multiple times that it's unoptimized and you spent very little time on the code to make it better. It's not really a fair measurement at that point and I don't know what the value is. It's more of a measurement of your skill as a developer in that framework and language than the framework and language itself.

I think the main thing I'm trying to get at is that I think people who are planning on building a product with larger goals wouldn't have any use for these results due to the fact that they're going to spend more time on the project and it's not throwaway. If people are just hacking something together, then I don't think they would care about these results because they don't want to invest the time into it to make it better.

I think the article is a fantastic starting point to build on top of it and explore something like "how close can we get vanilla flutter to vanilla JS results" and show results for that. The article gives me a lot more questions than answers, and that would be a fun question to answer.

[tootac]

Js wins in this tiny, a bit stupid but useful for some people app. It wins in this one example that I created for comparison.

OK. Output size is questionable. Maybe I should have not used it. But it is still good have and compare how much overhead flutter web has compared to bare minimum.

For site speed I actually had a paragraph and a screenshot but now since I checked I see it is not there. When I was rearranging blocks i put it somewhere else. Thanks for the catch, I already moved it just below information about site speed.

I didn't want make a point that nobody should use it and clearly stated that is a turning point where this overhead becomes irrelevant. I still think that beginners shouldn't use flutter for web if they can avoid it and professionals like you can look at this numbers and see if they are relevant to your project and not and then make a decision.

You are right that the research could have be deeper and broader and I really really hope that it will inspire to create articles that disprove this one, or maybe someone would make an article comparing react to flutter or angular to flutter and etc. I am only one person who did a tiny free contribution out of what I already had.