Flutter vs Qt QML for cross-platform app development

If you read my articles you can see me mostly writing about Qt QML or Node.js with which I have been working with for many years. However, I do like to look and evaluate other frameworks and technologies, and this time it came to Flutter with which I’ve been working in my free time for the past year.

In this article we are going to take a high level look on both Flutter and Qt QML and see what they can provide for when you consider doing native app development for multiple platforms.

Flutter

Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.

Flutter is a relatively new framework written from scratch (who doesn’t like a new framework?) using a custom C++ engine based around 2D Skia library and Dart language. Skia is a 2D C++ library also developed by Google and is used by many well known projects like Android, Chrome and Firefox while Dart is (now) a client-optimized typed programming language that can compile to native code and is also made by Google so one can expect that to be a good base for a UI framework.
The funny story for me already is that I came in touch with Dart at early beginnings while looking and languages good for backend development. How times have changed.