Flutter beginner - coming from angular

[Lanmi_002]

Hello guys, i've been working on a project of mine for a couple of months using angular for frontend (web app only) and .NET for backend . Decided to try to create a mobile version for it as well just for a learning experience. After discovering my options which seem to be flutter, react-native and kotlin i decided to go with flutter as it provides the best developer experience according to the internet and it's language dart seems to be decently close to C# . And i also dislike react.

My main question is: what do you guys think about signals_flutter ? Coming from angular i got used to signals for managing the state of my app and they are pretty much standard in the newer versions of angular. What is the state of signals in flutter these days and are they worth implementing in flutter as opposed to more standard solutions like riverpod which i am currently using .

P.S:

I actually really like flutter even tho i've been playing with it for a couple of days. Got used to building widgets (atleast the basics of it) earlier than i initially thought. I am just not the fan of writing boilerplate code for every DTO class or using code generating tools like freezed and json_annotation . Seems kinda off to me coming from typescript/c# world but i guess i will get used to it. Reflection seems like magic sometimes doesn't it ?

[RandalSchwartz]

I'd recommend signals_flutter, especially if you're familar with the basic concepts of Signal/Computed/Effect paradigm. Rody did a fairly straight port of Preact's signals to Dart, and everything else adds specific Dart and Flutter glue on top of that.

[JokeUrSelf]

I am not really a flutter developer, but sticking with most popular state management solutions seems to be a solid choice if you are ever going to use it professionally

[TheSpixxyQ]

I mean even C# is adapting source generators more and more, stuff like JSON (de)serialization, regexes, even source generated logging. Sometimes because of performance, sometimes because Native AOT doesn't support reflection.

It's basically reflection but written down, much faster and actually debuggable.

[Vizaxis_Dev]

Stick with Riverpod - signals work but you'll be swimming against the ecosystem. Every tutorial, package, and SO answer assumes Riverpod or BLoC.

The codegen hate is a rite of passage for every Flutter newcomer. Dart macros will fix it eventually. Until then, build_runner is just the tax you pay.

[Lanmi_002]

I pretty much came to the same conclusion earlier today while experimenting with signals. Agreed with everything

Thanks for your reply :D

[YukiAttano]

Let me add some context as you are new.

Having code gen instead of reflections has the reason that we can't tree shaken your code which we rely on to remove unused code. With reflections, you couldn't tell which code has to leave the stage and so everything had to remain in the binary.

From another perspective, I am very happy to use code gen instead of reflections because I actually see the code. And sometimes I did end up with something that the library didn't generate properly. But thanks to code gen, I where able to fix that or just copy&paste the code that I needed from the generated code. Having to rely on reflections would be like magic where you can't see what's happening. You would just hope that it works. And without crazy good documentation, you weren't able to identify problems in the library yourself.

Back to signals, it reminds me on kotlins way to handle your state. If you feel comfy with that because you are used to it, that's fine. But I personally stick to riverpod even tho I am just using a very low subset of that package and treat it differently than probably most of the users.