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gisborne

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gisborne
·11 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Flutter builds pretty decent desktop apps these days.
gisborne
·tahun lalu·discuss
Relevant analysis: https://guyren.me/2025/04/16/programming-in-the-age-of-abund...
gisborne
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
I would develop a production-ready Datalog database system.

I am convinced a better alternative to the execrable SQL would significantly raise developer productivity.

http://frest.substack.com
gisborne
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
If you are asking for the most general-purpose technology around right now, I would say Dart/Flutter.

Dart is a half-decent language, able to be used without excessive pain for mobile, desktop, web and backend development. It compiles to Javascript and WASM, as well as native code. And web can be either traditional HTML or a recreation of your mobile/desktop UI.

It’s a really healthy community with strong leadership and wide participation.

You’ll need SQL, but otherwise, you can build any kind of app with Dart and Flutter with reasonably fluidity.
gisborne
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
At some point, I need to dig into how good a general UI environment I get with Godot. There appears to be something at least usable there.
gisborne
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
I significantly prefer the Mac user experience over Windows (it’s bad, but Windows is abominable).

Still, I use Electron apps that UI-wise are fine. Well-known examples include Discord and Slack. They’re big and a bit slow, but they’re fine and I appreciate the uniform user experience when I use those apps on other platforms.

Flutter is just better, provides something close to a native experience, and slick experiences at that (really slick animation is easy) while being an efficient cross-platform development solution (for mobile, also).

But electron etc are a fine choice. The heft of the Javascript ecosystem, if nothing else, is a serious consideration.
gisborne
·2 tahun yang lalu·discuss
If you really are doing this for yourself, Flutter has the best development efficiency and you can use animations and such pretty easily to make a slick product.

But no-one hires Flutter developers at least in the US and Canada. It’s pretty popular in India and China and some other parts, but you’ll struggle if you want to find work doing this, or if you try to hire someone to do it (although the latter wouldn’t be terrible, and you’d be hiring someone who’s choosing a tool for its virtues, not just its market share).

If those considerations bother you, then Electron or something lighter weight like Gluon or Electrino.

The other major alternative is React Native. You should look at that also.

But if this is really just you, Flutter, no contest. Desktop, mobile and even web (although it is not ideal for just a web app, but it would let you offer a web version with minimal extra affort, and it’s improving in this area rapidly).