What the Flock?!
To address the elephant in the room: This month, Flock, a Flutter fork, caused a big stir in the community. Flock aims to maintain a fork of Flutter that will fix bugs you normally don’t have the time for. The community would like to help fixing the most pressing issues or minor problems that have not yet been fixed by the Flutter team.
But why make a fork when anyone can make a Pull Request? Flock creators argue that the PR process is lengthy, difficult, and not always welcome. Therefore, issues should get to the community much faster, and the Flutter team should "force" changes to merge into the Flutter framework.
At Netglade, we’re impartial to the whole project. Our biggest concerns are how they want to keep Flock up to date, whether this will cause too much bug fluctuation between Flock and Flutter versions, and many other, organizational issues.
In addition to Flock, we also got Nest –– a collection of tools and scripts for building your own Flutter engine. This can speed up other developers locally to get their own version of the engine up and running.
We will continue to monitor the project and are curious to see where it takes Flutter and the community.
Flutter Forum
A question for the community: Where do you discuss Flutter besides our Meetups and X?
We have a reddit r/flutterdev and, as you may know, an official Flutter Discord. The problem is that neither platform provides a place for coherent and substantive discussion. Reddit probably comes closest to what we have in mind.
But here comes a new challenger –– The Flutter Forum.
The platform’s becoming popular in the community and is quite active. We would be happy to see it serve as an all-in-one digital space to find interesting discussion and help other developers.
Let's meet there!
The Future is Cancelled
Slava Egorov, a developer of Dart, shared this proposal about Cancellable Futures –– https://gist.github.com/mraleph/6daf658c95be249c2f3cbf186a4205b9.
Currently, the problem is that Future is not really cancellable. Some programming languages have this concept, and the proposal suggests how Dart could also offer similar functionality.
Barrel files, barrel files everywhere
Have you encountered barrel files in your development? These are files that export multiple other files, often from different parts of the project, to make imports easier.
Like this:
This gives you access to all shared widgets. We use this approach in shared components, for example, but there is a debate whether barrel files slow down the performance of the analyzer (see here).
Do you have experience with this approach? If so, have you noticed an impact on the performance of the IDE? It might be worth trying to turn them off for a while and compare the results.
Advent of Code
Christmas is around the corner and every programmer knows that so is the Advent of Code https://adventofcode.com/. If you happen to be in the dark, this is a classic Advent calendar where you open tiny windows filled with gifts, but instead of chocolate treats, you get a programming task that will fry your brain. Wonderful to keep the Christmas spirit alive.
You can program in anything you want; you always submit an answer. If you want to measure your "strength" against the rest of us and prefer Dart, join this leaderboard: 1720361-92ab2c10.
The forum community will also be active.
Join the discussion here: https://forum.itsallwidgets.com/t/advent-of-code-2024/965/6
So may the Force be with you!
