Boden, Flutter, React Native?

A while back I had an idea for a mobile app that I still might write. The main problems were finding the time and analysis paralysis: what do I write the project in ?

I’ve done some Android development before using Qt, and it was a hassle. I’ve been told that JNI was made painful on purpose so that nobody would try to do it and I can see why. At least at the time the Android NDK had modern compilers compared to what my team was allowed to use for the rest of the codebase and it was my first taste of C++11 in production.

As much as I dislike the Apple ecosystem, it would be foolish to say the least to ignore iOS. Writing Java for the Android UI I can deal with (but wouldn’t be happy about), learning Objective C or Swift? That I’m not sure of. In any case, I don’t want to write UI code twice.

Since then, I’ve been meaning to look at Flutter, which seems to avoid most of the problems I would have to face otherwise. But that means learning Dart, which would be a significant sidetrack. Yesterday however, I learned on cppcast that there’s a C++ alternative called boden . On the one hand, I don’t have to learn a new language. On the other hand I have to write C++, with all the swordfights and seg faults that entails. Which leads me all the way back to analysis paralysis.

There’s also React Native and Xamarin, and probably a few other alternatives, but they all for reasons I can’t quite explain give me a bit of an allergic reaction.

I guess I’m going to have to bite the bullet and try one of these frameworks. Or all of them. Now to think of a tiny but not useless test project…

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