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flutter-team-archive
engine
C++2015–2025
flutter-team-archive / engine · Archived

engine

The Flutter engine

Mobile & Desktop
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
23Distinct people
25Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
7.6KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The Flutter engine

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year25 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-07-24 14:00:38 UTC to 2025-10-07 08:56:30 UTC.

02462015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

25 sources
zigzag312·Oct 7, 2025
Impeller renderer is about 100 KB [0]. You still need to add things like text layouting library and image codecs to that size. A few MB in total I guess, but much less than a full web engine. While Flutter could be used to draw UI to texture, Impeller could also be used by other UI frameworks. Recently, Avalonia team experimented with replacing Skia and a Flutter developer asked, if they are interested in using Impeller and even offered some help [1]. This would probably be suitable, as a more lightweight alternative to WebView, for integrating into game engines. [0] https://chromium.googlesource.com/external/github.com/flutte... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/1nv3snm/comment/nh7...
In Using Deno as my game engine
eseidel·Oct 28, 2024
Well, myself and a few hundred other contributors are behind Flutter. Happy to answer questions. The flutter.dev page got rewritten to be more "marketing friendly" a few years back. docs.flutter.dev is still maintained by the engineers however. Regarding who exactly contributes to Flutter, it's all on GitHub, so you can see the actual committers, e.g. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/graphs/contributors https://github.com/flutter/engine/graphs/contributors https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/graphs/contributors As for flutterfoundation.dev, it appears to be just Matt? Who used to be employed at Google and reported to me on the Flutter team but is no longer.
In We're forking Flutter
pzo·Oct 28, 2024
> How large is the Flutter team, today? Google doesn't publish this information, but my guess is that the team is about 50 people strong. I doubt google have even 50 flutter devs in their team. You can easily estimate by checking github pulse: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pulse/monthly https://github.com/flutter/engine/pulse/monthly Also take into account inflated commits by CI bots: engine-flutter-autoroll, skia-flutter-autoroll, auto-submit[bot], fluttergithubbot, flutter-pub-roller-bot
In We're forking Flutter
mdhb·Aug 12, 2024
I keep seeing this coming up and I have no idea where it’s coming from like it’s some self reinforcing feedback loop based on just utter bullshit. If I am remembering correctly the headcount on the Futter team literally changed by a single person. Here are some actual real life numbers you can use if you want to gauge the health of the two projects: 1. https://github.com/facebook/react-native/pulse 2. https://github.com/flutter/flutter/pulse Specifically Flutter’s 108 merged pull requests to React Native’s 1 and Flutter’s 330 closed issues to React Native’s 18. Also note that this doesn’t even include their rendering engine which had another 90+ closed pull requests https://github.com/flutter/engine/pulse The truth of the matter is that Flutter is actually is far better shape both from a technical and open source perspective.
In Show HN: Rust GUI Library via Flutter
zigzag312·Jun 30, 2024
I would be surprised, if Impeller isn't eventually ported to the web, as it's much smaller (100KB per architecture) than Skia/CanvasKit (1.5 MB). But like you said, this won't happen any time soon. Note that size comparison is not completely fair as even with Impeller, Skia (as HarfBuzz is embedded into it) is still used for text layout and shaping. > Updating the web engine to interface directly with Impeller is a non-goal at this time. It is a significant undertaking (compared to a flag to swap dispatchers that already exists) and also bypasses display list optimizations. > For this added implementation complexity, Web support has not been a priority at this time for the small team working on Impeller. > We are aware that these priorities might change in the future. There have been sanity checks to ensure that the Impeller API can be po
Read the rest
rted to WASM and also that Impeller shaders can be compiled to WGSL for eventual WebGPU support. https://github.com/flutter/engine/blob/main/impeller/docs/fa...
In Show HN: Thermion, an open source 3D rendering toolkit for Flutter and/or Dart
mhoad·May 8, 2022
Web support is early days at the moment and right now but you can take a look here https://gallery.flutter.dev/ to see for yourself where it’s at. I’ve seen hints of the medium term plan however which is AFAIK move from optimised JS to WASM, bring in WebGPU support, use faster canvas based rendering (rather than DOM although both are supported) and rewrite the rendering engine which is currently happening here https://github.com/flutter/engine/tree/main/impeller I don’t suspect those problems will remain on web for very long, that looks like a very credible path to push out great native level performance on web as well to me.
In Ask HN: How to build a desktop app in 2022
saurik·Nov 23, 2018
I have been doing a lot of research recently on Flutter, and sadly there are a lot of "little things" that end up feeling like showstoppers, at least if you want to support iOS, that all stem from a combination of its premise (to reimplement all of the UI) and its focus (which seems to be Android first). Here are a few examples that mattered to me: the keyboard input has tons of open issues that make it seem unusable (and what app doesn't need good text input...), taking photos with the camera picker apparently strips all of the EXIF data (which means the photo is going to show up in the wrong orientation with the wrong gamma, and so look totally broken), and despite constantly reading "they spent a ton of time making the accessibility work", if you actually glance through their issue tracker there are lots of accessibility issues that wo
Read the rest
uld seem to be serious problems for users relying on VoiceOver (and then of course, there are tons of accessibility features on iOS that are for people with other disabilities, and pretty much none of them are implemented at all for Flutter as these are all subtle changes to the native controls, each of which they are slowly reimplementing). https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/12920 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/9507 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/20693 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/24575 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/24574 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/18391 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/1668 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/14543 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/4830 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/4827 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/4826 And like... there are even serious issues on Android, stemming from a massive argument about how the core developers of Flutter don't want to support synchronous callbacks into the Dart isolate even though there are tons of Android lifecycle APIs that fundamentally require synchronous delegates :/. This issue is so serious that it supposedly makes Flutter entirely unusable on many Android devices, as it can't react to memory pressure requests (which means activities get destroyed) but also is unable to implement the save/restore state mechanism (so views come back either in subtly wrong ways or even entirely broken); and so people have been reporting that it is literally impossible to use the photo picker on smaller Android devices (as that is a widget that deterministically causes memory pressure). https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/6827 (opened Nov 2016) https://github.com/flutter/engine/pull/4358 ("closed" due to being rejected) https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/15479 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/15478 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/15476 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/21102 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/18059 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/17186 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/17165 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/18700 https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/17950 Essentially, I highly encourage anyone attempting to use pretty much anything to sit around and read through the open issues and look at what is currently being built vs. what is still on the roadmap, as the marketing messages behind a lot of these projects might say "we now support so many more iOS controls and it is amazing" while the reality on the ground is that the controls they have might only sort of work and the things that you need might not only not yet be done but might be on the list of things that the project has some philosophical aversion to (which is the case with the Android issues there: if any of those things will cause you a problem, you might be waiting for years to see fixes for them, as the obvious fix was rejected).
In Flutter: the good, the bad and the ugly

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