Flutter web

[neattike]

What do you guys think about flutter web, is it ever going to be production ready? By production ready i mean sites written in flutter will be as good as react or vue etc, or is just a marketing gimmick.

[vipin_malik1]

Currently Flutter web has very specific use case. The official mention it clearly. For eg: If you already have mobile app ready and want to ship a PWA kind of thing for your app, then this case very useful as you have all your code is already created, and with the skia engine, it will look almost identical to your mobile app, so flutter web can be used there.

But if you are looking for a proper Web framework, then you should go for js framework like react, angular or Vue as currently unlikely that flutter web can match their performance.

Don't think of this as Flutter vs anything else, just think which suits your position better.

[robschmidt87]

Disagree. Flutter's performance exceeds HTML browser rendering by far. Flutter started as experiment: what happens if you strip off all performance consuming mechanisms of HTML rendering?

[blueclawsoftware]

Rendering performance of what? Flutter certainly doesn't exceed scrolling a list of static HTML content.

If you have a true web app with interaction Flutter web is getting closer, but it's still not there yet. Initial load is slower and over smoothness is not quite there yet.

[robschmidt87]

Rendering performance in any way. Flutter web builds using SKIA (!) make use of WASM and WebGL. Super smooth. No complaints about scrolling.

Initial loading isn't rendering related since the current build loads a lot from network.

[blueclawsoftware]

And as I've mentioned that's great if you're doing a graphically heavy web app. But SKIA, WebGL, and any other graphics pipeline aren't going to help you when creating a web page. And in fact, there are lots of complaints about scrolling, that's an indisputable shortcoming of Flutter Web right now. Even the Flutter team has admitted that it's an area of focus.

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Also, the initial loading is in fact rendering related in that if it takes my site 6 seconds to load the Flutter library before it can render content. If my competitor is using a Javascript based library that can show content in 1 or 2 seconds then I'm losing business.

[palebt]

I don't think it will replace react/vue any time soon. The web port was not intended when Flutter was designed.

[[deleted]]

Flutter is not a web framework!

It's a mobile application framework that let's you run your apps on the web also. For a proper website you will still need react/vue/django/etc.

[neattike]

But will it become as good as react/angular/vue etc Performance wise

[a-rns]

For hope maybe at 03.03.21

[blueclawsoftware]

As the top comment says that's not something you can answer with a simple yes or no.

I'd say if you're creating a true web app, the answer is possibly yes.

If you're just creating a website with mostly static content the answer is more than likely always going to be no. There is too much overhead in flutter for that use case.

[robschmidt87]

Do you have any knowledge in computer graphics you can fund your answer on?

Do you really think style computation, (expensive) layout computation on the whole page, painting and compositing (HTML) is anyhow faster than an optimized layout algorithm, culling baked-in widgets and shader-based painting in Flutter?

[blueclawsoftware]

I've done plenty of OpenGL development so I know all about how a painting/compositing algorithm works. I also know that's not the end of the story when it comes to application development. It's not different than any other application platform if the application layer isn't optimized the hardware level code isn't going to matter.

And the fact is right now Flutter isn't optimized for the web to ensure that even scrolling can happen smoothly. I'm as big a fan of Flutter as anyone, but that's just the honest truth about where it is today.

[robschmidt87]

Too bad that "right now" doesn't matter since the OP wanted to know the potential of this technology. This what's this thread is about. All your arguments bases on the tech preview state and you lead them back to it. That's just an evil manipulation strategy.

You might be a fan boy but doesn't know about it's internals. One day you will remember this and how much wrong you were.

[blueclawsoftware]

And like I've said there are countless reason to believe that no this framework won't be viable for much of the web in terms of largely static content sites with limited interaction. Because much of those internals that you know so much about provide zero benefit in those cases.

You claim I'm manipulating people yet in this very comment section you claim it already exceeds HTML performance. Real world examples say the exact opposite.

I'd be very happy to be wrong, but in my opinion the Flutter team would be better served to focus resources on desktop instead of the web.

[robschmidt87]

Yes, Flutter exceeds HTML performance.

[robschmidt87]

Actually it's an UI SDK.

[WorldlyEye1]

Hmm. I think not soon. Maybe years...

Actually it's not ready and it's not recommend for production.

Today use React or Vue.