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Flock: a Flutter fork

A project called Flock has announced its existence. Flock is a fork of the Flutter user-interface toolkit project, motivated by frustration with the resources that Google is putting into Flutter.

We describe Flock as "Flutter+". In other words, we do not want, or intend, to fork the Flutter community. Flock will remain constantly up to date with Flutter. Flock will add important bug fixes, and popular community features, which the Flutter team either can't, or won't implement.

(LWN looked at Flutter in 2020).


to post comments

Interesting toolkit sadly tied to a language

Posted Oct 29, 2024 5:05 UTC (Tue) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (8 responses)

Flutter is an interesting toolkit, and many people are excited about using it because of its portability. I wish they hadn't made the decision early on to fundamentally tie the toolkit to a specific language, such that it's impossible to use as "just a GUI library" from other languages.

Interesting toolkit sadly tied to a language

Posted Oct 29, 2024 9:00 UTC (Tue) by jamescrake-merani (subscriber, #157540) [Link] (6 responses)

I haven't looked into Flutter much but I thought it was a bit odd that they went with Dart rather than using an already existing language. Was no other language suitable?

Interesting toolkit sadly tied to a language

Posted Oct 29, 2024 9:18 UTC (Tue) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link]

my theory, based on this being google, is that there was no other choice that wouldn't have resulted in dart getting nixed :)

Interesting toolkit sadly tied to a language

Posted Oct 29, 2024 10:26 UTC (Tue) by julemand101 (subscriber, #105158) [Link] (3 responses)

Interesting toolkit sadly tied to a language

Posted Oct 29, 2024 18:49 UTC (Tue) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (2 responses)

Java would have met those requirements. It would have been some work to build the AOT compiler but they had to build it for Dart too.

Interesting toolkit sadly tied to a language

Posted Oct 29, 2024 19:39 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Java doesn't really support async/await style of async. And it's needed for the kinds of environments where this has to work.

Interesting toolkit sadly tied to a language

Posted Oct 29, 2024 20:53 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

Kotlin does, however.

Interesting toolkit sadly tied to a language

Posted Oct 30, 2024 9:03 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

I have to be honest, I used to be a programming language geek, learning lots of different languages and I still pay attention to language related news and I have assumed for the last few years that Dart sort of quietly died soon after its creation from lack of popularity for all I have heard about it since the first year or two when it was announced.

Interesting toolkit sadly tied to a language

Posted Oct 29, 2024 18:47 UTC (Tue) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

Tight integration with the host language is a big plus for developer usability.

Who's behind the fork?

Posted Oct 29, 2024 6:14 UTC (Tue) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link]

I find it curious that the announcement use the plural "we", but does not describe who constitutes the group of people that it implies. Or if the group currently is more than a one – or perhaps two – man show.

The Github organization has no public members, and the two projects that are specific for the Flock foundation, "nest" and "website" only has a single committer, Matthew Carrol. The Github organization does reference another person, Jesse Ezell, by their Twitter handle, but I have not found how they're involved.

Are there more people and perhaps organizations behind this? If so, who and how are they organized?

I't is not my intent to cast doubt on the attempt by raising these questions. I have not used Flutter yet, but it has been on my radar because it seems to position itself well as a platform independent framework for app development. One of my concerns for Flutter is precisely that it is a project managed solely by Google, a corporation that is infamous for cancelling successful technology platforms almost at a moment's notice.

Hence I welcome any attempt to form a community driven independent organization that could balance Google's control over Flutter. And apart from the lack of clarity about who's behind the fork, I really like the organizational and technical approach of the fork described in the announcement. That is, a fork that aims to maintain compatibility with the upstream Flutter project, while it adds and supports more functionality and improved quality by staffing up with reviewers and coordination of patches. Areas where the size of the Flutter team at Google apparently is too small to keep up.

Questionable numbers

Posted Oct 29, 2024 14:21 UTC (Tue) by bjackman (subscriber, #109548) [Link] (3 responses)

> How many Flutter developers exist in the world, today? My guess is that it's on the order of 1,000,000 developers.

More than every 1 in 10,000 people in the whole world is a Flutter developer?

> a team that loves external contributions has only managed to merge contributions from 1,500 developers over a span of nearly a decade.

So, about the same amount as React.js? K8s has a bit over 3k, LLVM a bit over 3k. Those are arguably some of the most successful open-source projects out there, I'm not unconvinced "1.5k contributors in 10 years" is a signal of failure.

Questionable numbers

Posted Oct 29, 2024 17:55 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

>> How many Flutter developers exist in the world, today? My guess is that it's on the order of 1,000,000 developers.

> More than every 1 in 10,000 people in the whole world is a Flutter developer?

Who knows... Of course, they wouldn't be exclusive flutter developers. But given that over a million Android devices have Krita on them, and that there are over six million distinct concurrent Krita users in any given month, I wouldn't be so surprised.

There are also estimated (by the Qt company, in 2017, so what) to be around 1,000,000 Qt developers in the world. Flutter, probably, is used by more people.

A million isn't that much, a billion is.

And, of course, if a 1,000,000 people are Qt developers, 999,900,000 people are not. A million is not one in ten thousand of the total of the world population...

Questionable numbers

Posted Oct 29, 2024 18:09 UTC (Tue) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link]

… no, it’s more than 1 in 10000. A billion is 1000 millions. There are just over 8 billion humans, so it’s about 1 in 8000.

Questionable numbers

Posted Oct 29, 2024 23:51 UTC (Tue) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link]

There are about 25 million programmers in the world according to https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-many-software-develope...

1 million use flutter? I have no idea. I can't even figure out how to get an order of magnitude. I never have, but this is LWN, not Dart Weekly News.

Chance missed…

Posted Oct 31, 2024 6:13 UTC (Thu) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]

… to call it Flork.

j/k

It's happening again... (maybe)

Posted Nov 2, 2024 2:17 UTC (Sat) by csigler (subscriber, #1224) [Link]

I can recall that LibreOffice was preceded by a patch-improved-OpenOffice project called Go-OO :)

Clemmitt


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