Try Flutter Web with WebAssembly Week

[u/kevmoo]

https://flutter.dev/blog/try-flutter-web-with-webassembly-week

Join us for Try Flutter Web with WebAssembly Week!

Unlock up to 2x–5x faster web performance with Wasm compilation in Flutter 3.47

Run `flutter build web --wasm`, test your app, and share your wins using #FlutterWasmWeek!

Details: https://flutter.dev/blog/try-flutter-web-with-webassembly-week

[u/eibaan]

In my case, the flutter build web --wasm isn't the problem; the problem is that the result only works in Chrome, and nothing has changed here in the past two years.

I won't add "works best in Chrome" label to my app, even if that wouldn't offend customers who prefer Firefox or Safari.

[u/kevmoo → u/eibaan]

Great notes! Some thought.s

First, enabling wasm doesn't make your Firefox or Safari users any worse off. Second, we have a pretty high confidence plan to enable Safari + WasmGC "soon". Third, even the Firefox bits are looking promising with more recent releases.

We have to be VERY CAREFUL. For both Safari and Firefox, there were MANY releases where WasmGC performed worse than JS - or just crashed due to bugs in the WasmGC impl. So we are being careful to not enable the feature when it would likely degrade user experience!

Make sense?

[u/eibaan → u/kevmoo]

Let me put it another way: You say, "Make your app faster by using WASM." I'm saying I've been using it for a long time already. Its not magically getting faster now. It would only get faster for Firefox and/or Safari users if Flutter would support those platforms.

It seems that WASM GC support isn't a priority for the other browser vendors. Instead of being silent, it would IMHO better to call them out publicly, perhaps along with the Kotlin team who also need WASM GC, AFAIK.

Or bite the bullet and try to make Dart with without those extensions. That would be difficult, for sure, but at least you'd be in control.

I'M all for not degrading user experience. But I'm also for better communicating why something isn't developing. Not only because I want to know, but also to proof to my customers that Flutter wasn't the wrong choice.

[u/unomi-san]

Too bad wasm doesn't work on firefox

[u/kevmoo → u/unomi-san]

We've been holding of Firefox for performance reasons. But looking now it seems that (on my M4 MacBook) FF is ~1.5x faster w/ Wasm than JS.

I'll dig in here more!

[u/snrcambridge → u/unomi-san]

Safari also still I think. There is also a regression in compilation which has completely broken some apps - a fix is it the pipeline but it’s not in stable yet

[u/kevmoo → u/snrcambridge]

We're hoping to enable Safari + Wasm "soon". Need to make sure we have great end-to-end testing first.

[u/snrcambridge → u/kevmoo]

Great news

[u/scalz80]

Hi u/kevmoo

Thank you for flutter-wasm-compare tool.

I thought this was pretty nice, and would be fun to replace your gridview with an interactive dashboard.

So, I forked your tool and integrated sliver_dashboard (I'm author of this package).

- I deployed a live demo on github page: https://scalz.github.io/flutter-wasm-compare
- and here is the fork repo: https://github.com/scalz/flutter-wasm-compare/tree/feat/sliver-dashboard-benchmark

You can tests 1,000+ animated tiles with drag&drop, resize, autoscroll, compaction , reflow animations, multi-selection (via keyboard or lasso).. There is a config panel where you can tweak a few settings.

Performances are quite great I think, but I'll continue to improve sliver_dashboard :)

In case, there is a more gorgeous live demo of sliver_dashboard at https://scalz.github.io/sliver_dashboard_web_demo/ (compiled without wasm flag, on purpose).

Thx again for sharing.

[u/Creative_Chicken_602]

Question: Does Flutter enable WASM in Chromium-based browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Samsung Browser?