Projectreunion: Proposal: Support Flutter with Project Reunion

[fisforfaheem]

There are 50,000 flutter apps in both the iOS and Android store. What you saw was your own ignorance (not meant as an insult) of the technology. It works VERY well for iOS, Android and now macOS (with the majority of those apps getting ported to macOS almost immediately giving macOS the major win that Windows needs right now)

Web is about to go mainline and works very well too. As of June 25th you can write for iOS, Android, macOS and Web from one environment by simply learning Dart. (And yes, it supports essentially everything that Xamarin Forms does but with a pixel perfect renderer on all platforms)

The weaknesses of flutter are:

Some plugins haven't yet been ported to Web. They're coming quickly however.
Dart is not nearly the language that C# is.
Flutter doesn't have the Xamarin eco-system for Simulators, and compile to store etc. that Xamarin does.
Windows support is still lacking.
Linux support is still lacking.
There literally are no other downsides. I've built the same app in Xamarin and flutter and the flutter app looks way better, functions way better and is more stable. The development environment though limited is also way more stable.

1 is just a time thing.

2 The flutter rendering engine is C++ code and ANY language can be hooked to it. @SteveSandersonMS did a POC of Blazor running against flutter. That work needs to be taken seriously and made into a full project. There's 0 reason why C# can't be used with flutter and it would give flutter a vastly better development experience.

3 All of Xamarin tools could come over easily with the remote simulators etc. This is just a decision by MS. If you recall they had these working for Cordova before they dumped cordova support in VS.net. So it's already there and could easily be extended and publish to the stores is already there and just needs the blazor tooling.

4 This is on MS. Google has asked in a blog post for help from Microsoft. Microsoft has provided support for Duo in Flutter recently. If MS added Windows support and the ability to write plugins in C# UWP instead of having to use win32 and C++ Flutter's Windows ecosystem would flurish quickly because of the massively larger developer pool.

5. Not sure this even matters.

I'm a Microsoft guy. I love C#. It's by far the best development language made. XAML is another story but I'm going to ignore it for now. I would much rather never have touched Dart. It's a lame language that google created to compete with C# and Typescript and prove that they could make it more simple and in the process made most things more difficult.

I would very much love to see Microsoft succeed. But their current approach of project reunion is a fool's errand. With the exception of games and some highly specialized tools that require realtime responsiveness/low level hardware, Windows development on its current track is an ever shrinking market and reunion doesn't change that or give MS any new opportunities to expand that. Windows has quickly become a web browser with Office. Office is literally the only reason why most companies haven't switched to chromebooks or linux on desktops. Maui is just more of the same Xamarin that has proven to be a complete flop. Xamarin forms in specific is a mess. It's so bad that in 2019 they went 3 months without a build of visual studio that could
compile to all 3 stores at the same time because of bugs. Exactly 3 people even watched the bug reports. Changing the name and providing a syntax more similar to Flutter without the rendering engine that flutter provides is a pointless waste of resources because it still won't be used.

By adopting the flutter rendering engine and bolting on C# like dart is right now and then providing all of the tools necessary so that a dev never needs to own a Mac Microsoft has the opportunity to win BIGLY. And they have the opportunity to have their competitor do work for them. That means Duo and Neo get an app ecosystem and become relevant, and it means that Windows app development has a chance again.

[minecraftchest1]

Yay. Someone brave enough to tell Microsoft to do better.

[jonwis]

@fisforfaheem - Should the title of this issue be changed to "Proposal: Support Flutter with Project Reunion" ? Or "support a Dart projection for WinRT APIs"?

[mdtauk]

I thought a Windows implementation of Flutter was in development?
https://flutter.dev/desktop
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Desktop-shells

[fisforfaheem]

it needs support from Microsoft , linux supports flutter too

On Mon, Jul 20, 2020 at 9:00 PM Martin Anderson [e-mail]
wrote:

I thought a Windows implementation of Flutter was in development?
https://flutter.dev/desktop
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Desktop-shells

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[Jaiganeshkumaran]

@fisforfaheem - Should the title of this issue be changed to "Proposal: Support Flutter with Project Reunion" ? Or "support a Dart projection for WinRT APIs"?

I think it should be "support a Dart projection for WinRT APIs" since most Reunion APIs are provided as Windows Runtime components and adding a Dart projection will make it easier to use Reunion components from Dart and Flutter. You're not going use things like WinUI in Flutter.

[jonwis]

@Jaiganeshkumaran - there's no _requirement_ to use WinUI with Project Reunion. We aim to support multiple UX frameworks by providing broader and more timely access to Windows functionality.

"support a Dart projection for WinRT APIs"

Would you like to file an issue over on http://github.com/microsoft/xlang ? That's where we collect additional requests for projections.

[Jaiganeshkumaran]

@Jaiganeshkumaran - there's no _requirement_ to use WinUI with Project Reunion. We aim to support multiple UX frameworks by providing broader and more timely access to Windows functionality.

"support a Dart projection for WinRT APIs"

Would you like to file an issue over on http://github.com/microsoft/xlang ? That's where we collect additional requests for projections.

Done. See https://github.com/microsoft/xlang/issues/685.

[fisforfaheem]

Ok SIR ! really hope this goes to dev

[fisforfaheem]

now that .net 5 has released....anything changed? in relation to flutter???? in flutter 1.22 you can now make windows 10 apps too (UWP(alpha) and win32(beta))!

[Jaiganeshkumaran]

@fisforfaheem .NET 5 has nothing to do with Flutter or UWP. Flutter is fully native and will work without .NET

[fisforfaheem]

I know but it should.

On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 12:35 PM Jaiganesh Kumaran [e-mail]
wrote:

@fisforfaheem https://github.com/fisforfaheem .NET 5 has nothing to do
with Flutter or UWP.

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[soumyamahunt]

There are some work already done by @timsneath in timsneath/win32 and timsneath/winmd, @fisforfaheem have you tried those projects yet??