In a previous article we talked about the release of the new version of the Dart 2.14 programming language And now in this article we have to talk about the new version of Flutter 2.5 which was released in parallel with Dart.
In this new version of Flutter important performance optimizations have been made, Work has started for Apple M1 support, as well as various improvements, full screen support on Android, the implementation of "Material You" and much more.
For those unaware of flutter, they should know that this is considered as an alternative to React Native and allows launching applications for different platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and Linux, based on the same code base, as well as applications to run in browsers.
Mobile apps previously written in Flutter 1, after switching to Flutter 2, will be able to adapt to work on the desktop and the web without having to rewrite code.
About Flutter
Most of the Flutter code is implemented in Dart and the runtime engine for running applications is written in C ++. When developing applications, in addition to the native Flutter Dart language, you can use the Dart foreign function interface to call C / C ++ code.
Flutter portability too extends to embedded devicesi.e. to smaller devicess like Raspberry Pi and Google Home Hub.
At this point, Google says, one of the embedded platforms where Flutter is already operating is based on smart display operating systems that powers the likes of the Google Home Hub.
Main new features of Flutter 2.5
In this new version of Flutter 2.5, of the most important changes that stand out are for example shader precompilation for the Metal graphics API that is implemented on the iOS and macOS platforms, since in this new version Asynchronous event processing efficiency has been improved.
Besides that The problem of delays during memory release has also been resolved garbage collector of unused images (for example, while playing a 20-second animated GIF, the number of garbage collection operations has been reduced from 400 to 4 delays in transferring messages between Dart and Objective-C / Swift have been reduced up to 50% (iOS) or Java / Kotlin (Android).
Of the changes that are related toto Android, support has been established for the operation of applications in full screen mode, in addition to continuing with the implementation design concept "Material You", touted as a variant of the next generation Material Design.
A new MaterialState.scrolledUnder state was also added, the dynamic display of scroll bars when resizing was implemented and a new interface was proposed to display banners with notifications.
And the plug-in's capabilities for working with the camera have been significantly expanded, in which there are tools to control autofocus, exposure, flash, zoom, noise suppression, and resolution.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version of Flutter 2.5:
- Various fixes and improvements to the framework
- Adding scroll metric notifications
- New text editing features
- Enhanced developer tools (DevTools) with an updated widget watch mode, as well as tools to detect drawing delays and track shader builds.
- Improved plugins for Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ / Android Studio.
- Work has begun on this version, on the support for Flutter applications created in Apple Silicon M1 that run natively on ARM iOS simulators.
Finally yes you want to know more about it About this new version of Flutter 2, you can check the details in the original announcement. The link is this.
While for those who are interested in being able to install Flutter, You can follow the instructions at the end of Diego's post. The link is this.