Understanding Flutter and Dart: Why They Work Together

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: What is Dart?
• Chapter 2: Why Flutter Uses Dart
• Chapter 3: How Flutter and Dart Work Together

Chapter 1: What is Dart?

Dart is a general purpose programming language developed by Google and introduced in 2011. It is widely used for web, server and mobile app development, and has been adopted as the primary language for Flutter, Google's open source mobile app SDK.

Dart supports object oriented programming (OOP) and type safety for higher code reusability and fewer errors. It also has built-in memory management for automated memory allocation and deallocation.

  class Person { String name; Person(this.name); greet() { print('Hello, $name'); } } void main() { var person = Person('John Doe'); person.greet(); // Prints: Hello, John Doe }  

As seen in the example above, Dart has a clear and readable structure that improves developer productivity. This conciseness makes Dart effective for large scale projects.

Dart also features 'hot reload', which reflects source code changes instantly while the app is running. This greatly accelerates the development process.

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Chapter 2: Why Flutter Uses Dart

Here are some of the main reasons why Flutter chose Dart:

Dart's Characteristics

Firstly, Dart meets Flutter's core requirements. Dart supports both AOT (ahead-of-time) and JIT (just-in-time) compilation, allowing fast restart times during development and high performance when deployed.

Object Oriented Programming

Secondly, Dart is a pure object oriented language that is highly compatible with Flutter's widget-based architecture. It provides inheritance, mixins and other object oriented paradigms.

Hot Reload

Thirdly, Dart's hot reload feature allows immediate view of code changes which greatly improves development velocity. UI/UX tweaking and debugging become very easy.

  // A simple Flutter app in Dart import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp( MaterialApp( home: Scaffold( appBar: AppBar(title: Text('My First Flutter App')), body: Center(child: Text('Hello World')), ), ) ); }  

As seen above, Dart allows intuitive declaration of UI layouts. This is another reason why Flutter chose Dart.

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Chapter 3: How Flutter and Dart Work Together

Flutter and Dart are closely integrated to complement each other and boost productivity and performance.

Widgets and Object Oriented Programming

Dart's object oriented capabilities synergize well with Flutter's widget-based architecture. Everything in Flutter is a widget, implemented as Dart classes. This allows developers to easily compose UIs using object oriented syntax.

  // Implementing a widget in Flutter class MyWidget extends StatelessWidget { @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { return Text('Hello, World'); } }  

As seen above, we can easily define new widgets by extending StatelessWidget.

Hot Reload and Faster Development

Dart's hot reload feature significantly accelerates development velocity by reflecting changes instantly. Debugging and tweaking UIs becomes very fluid.

Conclusion

Dart is an excellent language to use with Flutter. Their strengths are synergistic, providing a development environment with high productivity and performance for app developers.

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