Leviathan vs Behemoth. Russia could be a strong land power, à la Rome. America is a maritime power, ruling via alliances and trade, à la Carthage. (Or Athens. Or the British or Dutch.)
Europe is in for a very long decline. There is no consumer generation (35-45 y/o) left in Europe, and the US is about to block Europe from exporting their excess production to the last standing consumer generation on the planet.
> On total whimsy, I tried Flutter. I downloaded it, and built "Hello World" for macOS. Not only did it take an eternity to compile (on my modern, SSD enabled, eleventy gigablip iMac), the result was 108MB. And that was just for the Mac version, I'd need 2 others for Linux and Windows. The compile time was glacial (I know, its got hot reloading to speed things up).
I'm curious how you got 108mb. Here's what I'm seeing:
$ flutter --version
Flutter 3.0.4 • channel stable •
https://github.com/flutter/flutter
Framework • revision 85684f9300 (7 days ago) • 2022-06-30 13:22:47 -0700
Engine • revision 6ba2af10bb
Tools • Dart 2.17.5 • DevTools 2.12.2
$ flutter create hello_world && cd hello_world
Creating project hello_world...
Running "flutter pub get" in hello_world... 1,764ms
Wrote 127 files.
All done!
In order to run your application, type:
$ cd hello_world
$ flutter run
Your application code is in hello_world/lib/main.dart.
$ flutter build macos
Building with sound null safety
Building macOS application...
$ du -ah build/macos/Build/Products/Release/hello_world.app | tail -1
44M build/macos/Build/Products/Release/hello_world.app
Note, the release build is significantly smaller than the debug build, which includes a full Dart VM for hot swapping application code:
$ flutter build macos --debug
Building with sound null safety
Building macOS application...
$ du -ah build/macos/Build/Products/Debug/hello_world.app | tail -1
98M build/macos/Build/Products/Debug/hello_world.app
Note, on the glacial compiles, here is what I'm seeing on my M1 mac laptop:
$ time flutter build macos
Building with sound null safety
Building macOS application...
flutter build macos 1.20s user 0.59s system 47% cpu 3.801 total
It's slower than building web pages in vim, but this is comparable with compiling desktop applications in Xcode.
Disclosure: I'm a Developer Relations Engineer for Flutter
I mean sure, but I presume they weren't talking directly about the exact size but that other desktop apps can be built for (at least) an order of magnitude fewer megabytes. In other words, it's not exactly 108MB that they really care about, it's that Qt or other frameworks could make a hello world app at 10MB. That's how I interpreted their comments anyway.
If you want a sneak preview of the functionality that can be delivered in Flutter at about the 100mb mark, sign up for the beta of https://www.superlist.com/
I'm curious which operating systems people are still waiting for. We have delivered Windows, macOS and Linux on stable as of Flutter 3. We don't have plans to add more, but people in the community are working on things like embedded Linux: https://github.com/sony/flutter-embedded-linux
Disclosure: I'm a Developer Relations Engineer for Flutter
Thanks for the update, although it should be pointed out that that was apparently very recent, as in May 2022. It's not like it's been there and makes my comment that people have been waiting on it inaccurate. I wasn't aware of stable macOS and Linux support, so thanks for pointing it out. As far as I know, Windows was the first to get stable desktop support from Flutter, and that was just at the very beginning of this year. Even now, the official Flutter Desktop webpage links back to that release as "new": https://flutter.dev/multi-platform/desktop
Flutter still cannot manage multiple windows on desktop, which makes it a no-go for my use cases, and it doesn't look like it's coming anytime soon: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/30701. The original issue has been sitting around for four years.
Fwiw, there is a viable work around. Android (and iOS) usage of the Google Maps APIs remain free. See the Mobile Native Dynamic Maps line on our pricing sheet: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing/sheet/
You can construct API keys that are restricted to an Android signing key, use it for the duration of the class, and then revoke it after the course work is done.
This is a question of perception. Faced with something that doesn't make sense, a geek will see it as a challenge, a puzzle, a worthy adversary. Geeks love challenges.
A lot of people don't. I have many people who have me on speed dial for when they feel like tossing their laptops out the window. It's for these people that the iPad is designed.
All of this "death of tinkering" shows me that none of you guys actually take the time to understand people other than yourselves, and this whole movement speaks to just how self centered the whole geek tribe is.
I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with. To the extent that the iPad makes computing more accessible to more people, that's a good thing. The problem is with the entirely separate issue of Apple actively putting roadblocks in the way of those of us who would like to customize it.
Conformance enforcement only gets you more of the same behaviour. It denies access to variation that engenders innovation.
Exploration vs exploitation.