Google’s Flutter showcases new graphics capabilities, WebAssembly and RISC-V support
The Flutter development team at Google has announced the latest release of their open-source UI framework, Flutter 1.17. This release includes a number of new features and improvements, including:
- A new CanvasKit-based renderer that enables 3D graphics on the web
- Initial support for the WebAssembly standard
- Support for the RISC-V architecture
The new CanvasKit renderer is based on the technology used in the popular Chrome browser, and provides support for both 2D and 3D graphics. This means that developers can now create web applications with Flutter that have advanced graphics capabilities. In addition, the new WebAssembly support means that Flutter applications can now be compiled to the WASM standard and run in web browsers. Finally, the RISC-V support means that Flutter can now be used to develop applications for the popular open-source hardware platform.
Google’s Flutter showcases new graphics capabilities, WebAssembly and RISC-V support
Key Points
- Flutter for web shows off new capabilities with output running on Firefox and Microsoft Edge
- Flutter for desktop delivers support for macOS Catalina and Linux
- New features also include RISC-V support, inline webviews and more
Today at Google’s I/O developers conference, the company’s Flutter team showcased a number of new features and updates for its open source toolkit for building native apps for mobile, web, desktop and more.
Flutter for web shows off new capabilities with output running on Firefox and Microsoft Edge: Flutter for web is still in a technical preview, but at I/O, Google showed off a number of new capabilities including output running on Firefox and Microsoft Edge. Google is also making it easier to migrate apps from the web to other platforms supported by Flutter.
Flutter for desktop delivers support for macOS Catalina and Linux: Flutter for desktop is also in preview, but at I/O, Google announced that it has added support for macOS Catalina and Linux. This enables developers to build desktop apps for all three major desktop platforms using a single codebase.
New features also include RISC-V support, inline webviews and more: Other new features in Flutter include support for RISC-V, inline webviews and a number of new animation and graphics features.
Google is also continuing to work on improving performance and making it easier to develop for Flutter.
Google’s Flutter showcases new graphics capabilities, WebAssembly and RISC-V support
By Sebastian Anthony
Google has released the latest version of its open source Flutter framework for developing cross-platform apps, showcasing some impressive new graphics capabilities, as well as support for WebAssembly and the RISC-V instruction set.
The main aim of Flutter is to enable developers to write a single codebase that can produce an app that will run on both iOS and Android devices. This is achieved by running the code in a Dart virtual machine that can be compiled to native code for each platform.
The key advantage of this approach is that it enables a very responsive user interface. This is because Flutter redraws the UI every time there’s a change, rather than waiting for the platform to do so.
The latest version of Flutter, 1.12, enables developers to take advantage of some new graphics capabilities.
- Adaptive fonts: This enables text to automatically resize itself to match the size of the container it’s placed in.
- Network images: Developers can now asynchronously load images from the network, making it possible to cache them for offline use.
- Platform views: It’s now possible for developers to embed entire web pages or fragments of native code from either Android or iOS.
In addition, Flutter 1.12 now supports Dart 2.5, which brings with it support for WebAssembly.
WebAssembly is a low-level assembly-like language that runs in the browser, providing a way to run code written in languages such as C++ on the web. The advantage of this is that it enables developers to port existing codebases to the web without having to rewrite them from scratch in JavaScript.
Dart 2.5 also brings with it support for the RISC-V instruction set. RISC-V is an open source Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that’s been designed to be easily implemented in hardware. The advantage of this is that it should enable a new wave of RISC-V-based devices and chips.