Google and Canonical have implemented the ability to create desktop applications for Linux in Flutter

Google and Canonical companies were made with a joint initiative to provide support for the development of graphical applications based on the framework Flutter; for desktop Linux systems. Flutter User Interface Framework is written in the Dart language (runtime engine for executing applications is written in C++), allows you to create universal applications that work on different platforms, and is considered as an alternative to React Native.

Despite the availability of the Flutter SDK for Linux, it has so far been used only for developing mobile applications and did not support building desktop applications for Linux. Last year, Google announced its intention to add the ability to develop full-fledged desktop programs to Flutter and introduced an alpha release for developing such programs for macOS. Now Flutter extended the ability to develop desktop applications for Linux. Support for developing applications for Windows is still in the initial prototype stage.

To draw the interface in Linux used binding based on the GTK library (support for Qt and other toolkits is promised to be added later). In addition to Flutter's native Dart language, which is used to create widgets, applications can use the Dart Foreign Function interface to call C / C ++ code and access all the features of the Linux platform.

Linux Application Development Support Offered in Latest Alpha Release FlutterSDK, which also implements the ability to publish Linux applications in the Snap Store directory. In the snap format, you can also find the assembly of the FlutterSDK. To develop applications based on Flutter, it is suggested to use the Visual Studio Code editor or the IntelliJ and Android Studio development environments.

As an example of Linux programs based on Flutter, an application is proposed Flock Contacts to work with the Google Contacts address book. In catalog pub.dev Three Linux-supported Flutter plugins have been published: url_launcher to open the URL in the default browser, shared_preferences to save settings between sessions and path_provider to define typical directories (downloads, images, videos, etc.)

Source: opennet.ru