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Hot reload is like the REPL of frontend development
Or you can use a frontend language with a proper REPL (e.g. ClojureScript)
But traditionally it's been full of caveats, namely whenever you have long-lived objects or instances of classes somewhere in your hierarchy, causing all sorts of hard to debug issues. I used to do manual hot-reloading when working in a Clojure codebase full time for a few years using Cider (Clojure IDE inside Emacs), and it still required a fair amount of organizing your code to mostly be immutable to avoid these caveats altogether. An entire philosophy came out of this when Stuart Sierra wrote about how he solved this using lifecycles and then released his Component framework to kind of codify these lifecycle ideas into a concrete thing. All this because hot-reloading is great but really fragile.
It actually works great if your'e using ClojureScript / figwheel / reagent / re-frame.
Flutter is the first thing that has gotten me excited about learning how to write a mobile application. Instead of some mash of languages and platforms, it seems as portable as they claim.

What are the best guides for learning Flutter? Any guides to mobile development for the type of person who works full time on C++ and C operating systems?

Really like development with Flutter. It has an excellent developers UX.

Suspect it will continue to gain momentum. Saw that it already had over 40k stars on GitHub.

Ah yes, Flutter, Google made it so it must be good :)

I tried it out but it definitely didn't turn me into a fan.

Google made it so it likely will be mothballed in < 5 years or I will have to rewrite my applications when they ship version 2.0.
Just out of curiosity, I realize you aren't a fan but was there anything which made you aversed to it?
Overly complicated, overly hyped, horrible syntax.
Something, something no cross platform abstractions == an engineering marvel just like that of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Uhhh, okay.
Prediction for 2021: ---------

Google's blog post from the future:

Since its inception 6 years go, we have seen more and more developers building cross platform mobile applications. Now, we see that at least 60% of mobile apps in Android use some form of cross platform technology.

We are proud that Flutter was part of that evolution.

We feel that the major goal of this framework was achieved,

And now we plan to move some of its feature right into Android OS, with the goal of enabling other frameworks to take advantage of Flutter's UI, networking and platform independent mobile device hardware access.

We hope that the new focus will let developers using React Native and other technologies, to leverage the Flutter features on a wider variety of mobile devices.

----

End of prediction.

Basically Dart will be dead by then. Kotlin will be on the rise including for Ios.

Flutter is already a big part of the vision for Fuchsia.

I am worried about its dependence on Dart, though ...

Dart needs Flutter.

Lets see if we don't see a Flutter rewrite in something else.

The sky might be the limit, just don't try to fly too high though.