Dart vs Flutter

Overview

Dart

Stacks4.3K

Followers3.8K

Votes452

Flutter

Stacks17.7K

Followers16.8K

Votes1.2K

GitHub Stars173.7K

Forks29.4K

Dart vs Flutter: What are the differences?

Introduction

Dart and Flutter are both popular tools used for developing mobile applications. While Dart is a programming language, Flutter is an open-source UI toolkit. Here are the key differences between Dart and Flutter.

Compilation: Dart is a compiled language, which means that the code is converted into machine code before it can be executed. On the other hand, Flutter uses a just-in-time (JIT) compiler during development and an ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler for production, making it highly efficient and fast.
Platform Support: Dart is a language that can be used to develop applications for multiple platforms, including mobile, desktop, and web. In contrast, Flutter is specifically designed for building mobile applications and provides excellent cross-platform capabilities, allowing developers to write code once and run it on both Android and iOS platforms.
User Interface Development: Dart provides a wide range of libraries and tools for building user interfaces, allowing developers a lot of flexibility and control over the UI. Flutter, on the other hand, comes with its own set of widgets that are highly customizable and offer a rich and native-like user experience. This makes UI development in Flutter faster and more efficient as compared to Dart.
Hot Reload: One of the standout features of Flutter is its hot reload capability, which allows developers to see the changes made to the code in real-time without restarting the application. This significantly speeds up the development process and enables quick iteration. Dart, on the other hand, does not have such a feature built-in.
Community and Ecosystem: Dart has been around for a longer time compared to Flutter and has a larger community and ecosystem. It has a wide range of libraries and frameworks available, making it easier for developers to find solutions to their problems. Flutter, although rapidly growing, has a smaller community and a more focused ecosystem, which may limit the availability of certain libraries or tools.
Learning Curve: Dart is a language that is relatively easy to learn, especially for developers who have experience with object-oriented programming. It has clear syntax and familiar concepts, which makes it accessible to a wide range of developers. Flutter, on the other hand, requires developers to learn its specific widget tree structure and reactive programming concepts, which may have a slightly steeper learning curve.

In Summary, Dart and Flutter have some key differences. Dart is a versatile programming language that can be used for different platforms, while Flutter is a UI toolkit specifically designed for mobile app development. Flutter provides a powerful UI development experience, with hot reload and a rich set of customizable widgets, while Dart offers a larger community and a wider range of libraries for various applications.

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Advice on Dart, Flutter

Nick

CTO at Pickio

Jun 2, 2020

Decided

We built the first version of our app with RN and it turned out a mess in a while. A lot of bugs along with poor performance out of the box for a fairly large app. Many things, that native platform has, cannot be done with existing solutions for RN. For instance, large titles on iOS are not fully implemented in any of existing navigations libraries. Also there's painfully slow JSON bridge and many other small, yet annoying things. On the other hand Flutter became a really powerful and easy-to-use tool. A bit of a learning curve, of course, because of Dart, but it worth learning. Flutter offers TONS of built-in features, no JSON-bridge, AOT compilation for iOS.

491k views491k

Comments

Muhamed

Apr 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Python

JavaScript

Django

I am currently learning web development with Python and JavaScript course by CS50 Harvard university. It covers python, Flask, Django, SQL, Travis CI, javascript,HTML ,CSS and more. I am very interested in Flutter app development. Can I know what is the difference between learning these above-mentioned frameworks vs learning flutter directly? I am planning to learn flutter so that I can do both web development and app development. Are there any perks of learning these frameworks before flutter?

737k views737k

Comments

Anonymous

CEO at ME!

Jun 7, 2020

Decided

While with Ionic it is possible to make mobile applications with only web technologies, Flutter is more performant and is easy to use if you are willing to learn Dart, which is a fun language. Plus, it has awesome documentation and, while its ecosystem isn't near as big as JavaScript's is, it has a good package manager called Pub and its packages are generally high quality.

403k views403k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Dart	Flutter
Dart is a cohesive, scalable platform for building apps that run on the web (where you can use Polymer) or on servers (such as with Google Cloud Platform). Use the Dart language, libraries, and tools to write anything from simple scripts to full-featured apps.	Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Dart’s comprehensive libraries give you lots of choices;Compilation to JavaScript lets you deploy Dart apps now;Pub package manager;Dev Server	Fast development - Flutter's "hot reload" helps you quickly and easily experiment, build UIs, add features, and fix bug faster. Experience sub-second reload times, without losing state, on emulators, simulators, and hardware for iOS and Android.;Expressive UIs - Delight your users with Flutter's built-in beautiful Material Design and Cupertino (iOS-flavor) widgets, rich motion APIs, smooth natural scrolling, and platform awareness.;Access native features and SDKs - Make your app come to life with platform APIs, 3rd party SDKs, and native code. Flutter lets you reuse your existing Java, Swift, and ObjC code, and access native features and SDKs on iOS and Android.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 173.7K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 29.4K
Stacks 4.3K	Stacks 17.7K
Followers 3.8K	Followers 16.8K
Votes 452	Votes 1.2K
Pros & Cons
Pros 60 Backed by Google 54 Flutter 39 Twice the speed of Javascript 35 Great tools 30 Scalable Cons 3 Locked in - JS or TS interop is very hard to accomplish 3 Lack of ORM 0 A	Pros 149 Hot Reload 126 Cross platform 107 Performance 90 Backed by Google 74 Compiled into Native Code Cons 29 Need to learn Dart 11 Lack of community support 10 No 3D Graphics Engine Support 8 Graphics programming 6 Lack of friendly documentation
Integrations
No integrations available	Android SDK Firebase

What are some alternatives to Dart, Flutter?

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Ionic

Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Related Comparisons

Dart vs Flutter: What are the differences?

Introduction

Compilation: Dart is a compiled language, which means that the code is converted into machine code before it can be executed. On the other hand, Flutter uses a just-in-time (JIT) compiler during development and an ahead-of-time (AOT) compiler for production, making it highly efficient and fast.
Platform Support: Dart is a language that can be used to develop applications for multiple platforms, including mobile, desktop, and web. In contrast, Flutter is specifically designed for building mobile applications and provides excellent cross-platform capabilities, allowing developers to write code once and run it on both Android and iOS platforms.
User Interface Development: Dart provides a wide range of libraries and tools for building user interfaces, allowing developers a lot of flexibility and control over the UI. Flutter, on the other hand, comes with its own set of widgets that are highly customizable and offer a rich and native-like user experience. This makes UI development in Flutter faster and more efficient as compared to Dart.
Hot Reload: One of the standout features of Flutter is its hot reload capability, which allows developers to see the changes made to the code in real-time without restarting the application. This significantly speeds up the development process and enables quick iteration. Dart, on the other hand, does not have such a feature built-in.
Community and Ecosystem: Dart has been around for a longer time compared to Flutter and has a larger community and ecosystem. It has a wide range of libraries and frameworks available, making it easier for developers to find solutions to their problems. Flutter, although rapidly growing, has a smaller community and a more focused ecosystem, which may limit the availability of certain libraries or tools.
Learning Curve: Dart is a language that is relatively easy to learn, especially for developers who have experience with object-oriented programming. It has clear syntax and familiar concepts, which makes it accessible to a wide range of developers. Flutter, on the other hand, requires developers to learn its specific widget tree structure and reactive programming concepts, which may have a slightly steeper learning curve.

Dart vs Flutter

Overview