At the Flutter Forward conference in Nairobi, Kenya, Google announced an ambitious roadmap for Flutter, a Dart framework, including plans to support WebAssembly (Wasm). The internet giant wants its developer community to help build its plans. We also released Dart 3.0 and Flutter 3.7.
Flutter is Google’s open source mobile UI framework. Planned upgrades to Flutter include the ability to compile to WebAssembly, improved graphics performance, interoperability between JavaScript and Dart, and the ability to add Flutter components to web applications. We currently support Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, and web, but you can also use Flutter on embedded platforms.
Tim Sneath, director of product and UX at Flutter and Dart, told The New Stack: “We want people to join us on the journey. Nearly half of Flutter’s contributors don’t work for Google, but for other companies and communities. Setting our roadmap.” So they can get the chance to participate in it.”
Flutter has grown to have about 700,000 apps published on the store, ranging from startup uses to big companies like BMW and Toyota, and about 30 different projects inside Google (including Classroom and Google Pay). It’s being used, Sneath said.
Google also released Flutter 3.7. This is a stable release that adds a new rendering engine to iOS, better support for Material 3 and iOS-style widgets, revamped internationalization support, improved backgrounding, and updated developer tools. it was done.
But the main focus of the conference and announcements was the road ahead for next year, Sneath said. Areas where Flutter hopes to innovate in the next year are:
Flutter integration with Web, JavaScript and Wasm
“We invest in making Flutter easy to integrate with other code. Whether it’s a mobile app with system APIs you want to communicate with, or you want to take Flutter code and drop it into a web experience. I have already written,” Sneath said. “Not every line of code in the world is his Flutter app, so all the work we’ve done here has been done so that Flutter can easily interact with anything else that might be written there.” It’s meant to be.”
This means that Flutter components can now be dropped onto websites and developers can apply CSS transformations (such as reflection) to Flutter components.
Flutter also has better interoperability with JavaScript.
“You can interact with Flutter widgets from JavaScript and vice versa,” he says. “Being able to read data from flutter from the JavaScript side presents some new opportunities.”
Google is also working on a new approach to integrating with system APIs to reduce custom code requirements when integrating with Android and iOS. For example, if a developer has a new Android Jetpack library or a new Apple library they want to integrate, they can call the new Dart commands and it will automatically generate all the bindings that interact directly with those APIs. said Sneath.
Next is WebAssembly. WebAssembly did not initially support garbage-collected languages like Dart, so Google worked with his WebAssembly body and the Chrome team to enable support for such languages, Sneath said. increase. Not all browsers support it yet, but you can run it in Chrome Canary, Google’s developer browser.
He added that it may be fully supported later this year.
“Dart was one of the first to adopt this,” he said. “We can now use it to compile our Flutter apps to WebAssembly. I’m excited to see what people do with it.
Finally, Flutter now supports RISC-V, an open source architecture standard.
“We don’t have a lot of physical RISC-V-based hardware yet, but we see this as part of the next-generation process,” Sneath said.
Improved mobile graphics performance, 3D support
Historically, cross-platform frameworks have had to compromise visually for the challenge of creating an abstraction layer, Sneath said in a blog post on Tuesday.
“Flutter takes a different approach than most, with its own rendering layer that offers hardware accelerated graphics and provides a consistent visual look across all devices,” he says. is writing “Going forward, we will continue to invest in his performance in groundbreaking graphics that extend Flutter’s existing strengths in this area.”
“We’re pushing the boundaries there,” he told TNS. “We have spent the last few months reworking the entire graphics rendering pipeline in a project called Impeller. Designed to ensure a smooth experience every time cast iron.”
Google shipped initial support for Impeller at the conference. This demo video shows his traditional Flutter render engine on the left and his new Impeller render engine on the right. Impeller is available with an opt-in flag in Flutter 3.7 for iOS.
Impeller is optimized for Flutter, giving developers more flexibility and control over their graphics pipeline. Impeller provides more predictable performance by using pre-compiled shaders that mitigates dropped frames at runtime caused by shader compilation, his Sneath explains in a blog post. It uses primitives from Metal and Vulkan, the latest low-level APIs for iOS and Android. It also “uses concurrency effectively and distributes the workload of a single frame across threads,” he added.
“In some cases, Impeller provides a performance improvement of 6x to 9x over previous graphics engines,” he said. “But it’s not just about performance and silky-smooth quality, it also opens the door to some new kinds of experiences that people want to build.”
Pixel shaders are now supported. This is the ability to create low-level graphics GPU functions that run on every pixel on the screen, across web and mobile. It allows things like blur effects and other graphics processing experiences, he added.
Google has also started early work on supporting 3D in Flutter, he added. The conference demonstrated how to import models created in Blender and using hot reload he iterates through Blender in real time and sees the results in a running app.
Image credit: Google
“We are entering the world of 3D and supporting 3D graphics with Flutter. [is] It’s a whole new dimension, like our next generation,” he said. “That means you can work in traditional 3D tools like Blender, create models and 3D meshes, which he can import into Flutter and then program and use like any other code.”
He explained that it is made possible by the Dart code that Flutter is programmed with. It can run on devices up to the iPhone Six announced in 2014.
“It’s very interesting to see this combination of 2D and 3D graphics, and historically these were different domains, different technologies, different languages,” he said. “Now we’re putting it all together, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when we’re able to put these things together.”
Improved developer experience with Dart, Flutter
Google also released Dart 3 this week, which includes new language features that improve the developer experience, Sneath added. Dart 3 completes our journey towards null security, a key component of writing bug-free code.
“Dart 3 also removes other long-deprecated features to further modernize the language,” Sneath explains. “We have started publishing alpha quality builds of Dart 3 and his corresponding Flutter builds for developers to test their packages and apps.”
On the Flutter side, Google provides the first version of their news toolkit. It is aimed at local news publishers who want to offer a mobile app but lack the resources to build one. White label solutions provide templates to help you build mobile apps. Google has partnered with his three news agencies in Africa to roll out the service, including Morocco’s largest publisher and Kenya’s paper of record, Standard.
Sneath emphasized that not all the work is done, but that it is all doable.
“We’re going to show some very early demos here, but it’s basically a gateway to where we’re going as a team in the future,” he said.
