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Ask HN: Is Flutter/Dart safe from the Google chopping block?

3 points by offsky ↗ HN
I was just about to invest considerable time and effort into learning Flutter and building a cross platform app. I’m well aware of Google’s propensity to cancel products, but the Google Domains news was still surprising to me because it seemed central to their GCP business. Now. I’m not so sure that Flutter won’t be canned next year. I mean, Google isn’t making mega money directly from Flutter, so it can’t be safe. Opinions?

4 comments

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kweingar
Big tech companies don’t make money directly from their open source languages and tools. But neither do solo maintainers or volunteers (most of the time).

As with every open source project, you have to consider who is driving development, governance, community-building, and (if applicable) funding. Any of it could go away at any time with an untimely departure, lack of funding, or dissipation of interest.

If you’re not paying for an SLA, you have to accept that you truly are getting your software as is.

schemescape
I was also looking at Flutter and had a similar realization with respect to Google Domains (which I use and will eventually probably transfer away), although mine is just for a hobby project.

To be fair, however, UI frameworks seem especially prone to dying off. Flutter has probably already outlived multiple UI frameworks from Microsoft (I can’t even keep track at this point).

In the end, I was trying to avoid using HTML because I didn’t want to have to rely on something as inefficient as Electron (specifically its memory and storage footprint), but I just don’t see Flutter or its competitors lasting anywhere close to as long as HTML. So I might just end up going with HTML/Electron. (PWAs aren’t an option in my case.)

Alifatisk
There have been previous discussions regarding this topic, I suggest you to read through them!

TLDR: Flutter is here to stay.