Saturday, July 14, 2018

Google Flutter: Dart + Skia = mobile future!


Two excellent, very informative technical podcast interviews!

technical background, from users perspective:
Flutter in Practice with Randal Schwartz - Software Engineering Daily

technical background, from creators and project lead perspective:
Flutter with Eric Seidel - Software Engineering Daily

Flutter is created by extracting and re-purposing "essence" from Chrome engine, with intent to make universal mobile app platform, that can run natively on both Android and iOS.

How is this done? By using Chrome's high performance graphical rendering engine Skia as well as its text renderer.  Dart programming language is used for complete end-to-end platform, no "bridges" to

OS widgets renderer, like it done by React Native or Xamarin for example. The result is much better performance, simplicity, and less HW requirements: it could also run on IoT devices, for example.
So Flutter is using same code for running on all platforms, no need for different view layers.

DartDart language is also very important. Created by same person, Danish computer scientist Lars Bak. He created Java's high performance HotSpot JIT compiler, that made Java really usable. Then created JavaScript V8 engine that made  web apps possible by improving performance 1000+ times. Dart is essentially what JavaScript could have been if it could break backward compatibility. It is type safe language, that can run with its own high-performance JIT VM, or it can cross compile to JavaScript to run in any web browser, or it can compile directly to native code for optimal mobile applications.

Google is apparently using Dart with Angular for its most critical business applications (for advertising), instead of previously used  Java Closure compiler that generated JavaScript from simplified Java code.

In parallel with Angular Dart Google also develops Angular TypeScript , that is very popular outside of Google. TypeScript is created by another very prominent Danish computer scientist,
Anders Hejlsberg. the "father" to Turbo Pascal, Delphi and Microsoft C#.
The logo of the Fuchsia operating system, a fuchsia-colored, tilted, two loop infinity symbol. The left loop is larger and higher. The right loop is smaller and lower.

Flutter has potential to be a basis of Google Fuchsia, that could be a replacement of current Android platform.

So Flutter & Dart have potential to be a "big deal" in technology future.


Get Started: Install - Flutter

Write Your First Flutter App - Flutter

Flutter Tutorials - Flutter


a great podcast:
Software Engineering Daily

another interesting podcast:
FLOSS Weekly
"FLOSS all about Free Libre Open Source Software"