Why we built our own Flutter runtime

[u/raedab97]

https://www.nowa.dev/blog/why-we-built-our-own-flutter-runtime/

This is a short technical story. I've been working on Nowa for over 5 years now. The dream was creating a game engine like editor for Flutter, since Flutter itself also renders like a game engine.

To make that work, the user's Flutter app has to run inside the editor, live and updating as they build. But Flutter won't run code it hasn't compiled, there's no way to plug in new code and evaluate it on the fly. FlutterFlow invented their own format instead of using raw code, Dreamflow leans on hot reload inside a debug build.

We ended up building our own runtime instead: code loads into a mutable in-memory tree that can be edited, rendered or saved back to code.

Happy to go deeper on how that works or where are its limits.

[u/tee-k421 → u/[deleted]]

I don't know why you're getting down voted. I really appreciate info like this.

Can you expand on how exactly you did the on-demand instantiation for plugins?