Absolutely. Here’s the thinking around why we’d justify a rewrite at this point:
- Interoperability with the IC frontend tools. All the IC frontend libraries that are published to date are written in TS. We managed to create a bridge between these TS tools and Dart, but that bridge is not type safe and has continuously been a source of bugs in production. The proper solution here would to be have Dart ports for all these tools.
- Testing. Using a CanvasKit renderer prevents from using testing tools that rely on the DOM, like Selenium, for end-to-end integration tests. We did explore replacing the CanvasKit renderer with the HTML renderer, but even that resulted in a strange DOM and bizarre UI issues.
- Team experience. Likely some of the above issues are amplified because the current team aren’t Flutter experts, and so moving to standard web technologies would be more aligned with the experience of the team (and the experience of FE developers at large).
Note that this isn’t a general critique of Flutter/Dart, but more of a critique of using Flutter/Dart for our specific use-case. Would be happy to hear your perspectives if you think there’s a better path forward.