I so hate Flutter and Dart with a passion. Fuck those technologies.
Dart is among the ugliest programming languages I've ever had the displeasure of using.

What's wrong with Flutter?

Background: (Although I have several years of Dev Experience, I am new to App Dev and wanted to start with Flutter)

It's 2025 and we still need janky cross-platform solutions, which is on the hardware vendors...but as far as these janky shitfests go, I didn't find flutter TOO bad. I did feel like you at first, because I resent learning an entire platform for what is likely to be one project, but it could be worse. You could be writing native Android.

Dart is really one of those languages that has no good reason to exist. I mean we already have C#, Kotlin and Swift. Why Dart? Just why?

@Lensflare I think "learning a pointless language you will never use for anything else" is just part of mobile development at this point. Swift, Kotlin, probably a bunch of others. In a few years they'll be as valuable as Actionscript.

You're right, we should probably make a new language! Let's call it Fart!

But in all seriousness, I don't mind Dart. It's decently powerful and easy to work with, though I do hate the infinite nested structures of Flutter in general. Dart is otherwise just "ok" as a language. I'd prefer building my phone apps with a more common language that's not javascript

@glowFX good luck. If you plan on releasing your app to both iOS and Android stores, you'll have to deal with their "requirements".

It could be worse, for example - Java with XML, Objective-C with UIKit...

@MM83 seriously doubt that for Kotlin. Unlike actionscript it's also used for certain UI niches however that is not what it is designed for. It's a Java superset they got enough traction to exist beyond a single company (Jetbrains in this case, Macromedia/Adobe in case of actionscript)

https://docs.flutter.dev/resources/...

Obligatory ref. I think that at the time certain languages were missing some features and the being able to adapt the language precisely for Flutter (as Dart is not really used for anything else) is the main reason. I'd rather see a specific patched version of Kotlin or Go (similar to tinygo) but hey it seemed to work well. Flutter is about the only good cross platform app dev solution.

@MM83 not really. Kotlin is pretty big in backend via ktor and Swift can be used for embedded and scripting.
Dart is extremely niche and has not a single exclusive feature that wouldn’t also be available in Kotlin and Swift.

@hjk101

> Flutter is about the only good cross platform app dev solution.

It will still face the same fate as every other cross platform app dev "solution":
Oblivion.

Just a matter of a few years.

@Lensflare not going to argue with that.

@Lensflare Granted, but I think the original point stands. They could have used an existing language in every case. I was present at the birth (and death) of a vanity internal scripting language, and saw the absolute hell it caused everyone, I'm probably scarred.

@MM83 yup, and I witnessed the birth and death of all the hybrid/cross platform mobile bullcrap "solutions".

I heard every lie about the problems that they supposedly used to solve and the double speed development that you‘d supposed to have using those "solutions".

I experienced the lack of delivery of every promise that those "solutions" used to make.

@Lensflare Yeah I remember all the "solutions" and they never work and always shit experiences for the end user

@Lensflare don't, you're bringing me out in Sencha Touch hives.