Research on adding plugins to an app with Dart Eval

[Zverik]

Hey guys, I have finished my two-week research on interpreted languages, working with intents, planning API, and using dart_eval to add a plugin subsystem to an app. Hope it helps!

• A huge article
• GitHub repo with an example app
• Mastodon post with a video

[Nimishxyz]

Great Article and research, just a quick question what do you think about rfw(remote flutter widget) and why didnt you considered it for the plugin system?

[Zverik]

For my app, I need an easy to use scripting language, which is used not only for defining widgets, but also to write logic, e.g. protocols for connecting to third-party servers, and processing data in new formats. For that, I felt that an existing language (dart, lua, js) would be better than making people learn a new language.

Though I haven't heard of rfw, it's pretty obscure and isn't presented in any search result. Thanks for referencing it!

[Nimishxyz]

For my app, I need an easy to use scripting language, which is used not only for defining widgets, but also to write logic, e.g. protocols for connecting to third-party servers, and processing data in new formats. For that, I felt that an existing language (dart, lua, js) would be better than making people learn a new language.

Though I haven't heard of rfw, it's pretty obscure and isn't presented in any search result. Thanks for referencing it!

Yes, it's an official plugin from Flutter developers to render widgets remotely. It's similar to writing UI in Flutter and supports connecting other languages for logic, like wasm. It's kind of language-agnostic, so any language supporting Wasm can be used for the logic. I am still learning about it and still finding out ways to add support for the plugin in my app.

[Zverik]

To be fair, WASM is not a programming language per se, you need to set up a toolchain to compile into it. And bery few people can do that. I wanted something simple :)

I also haven't started working on dynamic plugins yet, so we'll see how it works out in a couple weeks.