Will Ring ever allow you to use Flutter?

[Anthony Souls]

I'm just learning the language, but I was wondering if Ring has any plans to create Flutter apps? I don't know if it's possible. 

I know Flutter makes it easy to write Windows and Android apps and uses Dart, but it would be cool if you could use Flutter with Ring. 

Maybe if I got good enough, I would know how to create a Flutter library? It's probably not trivial, so I would never be able to do it, lol, but has anyone else done or thought of it? 

Thx

[Mahmoud Fayed]

Hello

A developer with knowledge about Dart, C & Ring could write a library to execute Ring code from Dart

Documentation:

https://dart.dev/guides/libraries/c-interop

https://ring-lang.github.io/doc1.18/embedding.html

But if you want to push Ring into the Flutter world and have it in a good position that reflects the language power

It will be better to create a libraries for Ring (Natural/Declarative) that translate/generate the code to Dart/Flutter

This way, a better mobile development tool could be provided where there is no need to learn Dart, Flutter or Ring

And a domain specific language (based on Ring) could be used to describe the application

It may be limited but it could be useful for beginners

I don't have a plan to do this myself, maybe a developer in the community could do that in the future

Greetings,

Mahmoud

[Anthony Souls]

I guess what I mean is, there is RingQT and RingAllegro, so couldn't someone make RingFlutter? 

You talk about transcompiling Ring into Dart and Flutter, so is that what RingQT and RingAllegro does? 

THx

[Mahmoud Fayed]

Hello

I understand your question, Ring support creating extensions using C & C++

Allegro is a game programming library for C

Qt is a Framework for C++

Through Ring support for extensions written in C/C++ we created RingAllegro & RingQt

No transcompiling is done

It's just like creating a Ring library, but this time the library is written in C/C++ instead of writing it in Ring

And this requires creating a binding that uses Ring API for C (To pass data from Ring to C functions and get output from C functions as Ring values)

Flutter is a framework for Dart language (Not a framework for C/C++)

And Ring doesn't support creating extensions in Dart language

So we have to go the other way

Dart call C/C++ code and C/C++ code call Ring code (Which we call embedded Ring in C/C++ instead of extending Ring using C/C++ code as we did with RingAllegro and RingQt)

Embedding Ring in C/C++ is what we did with (RingQt for Android & RingQt for WebAssembly) - We export a Qt project that contains Ring VM and run Ring object file (*.ringo)

With Flutter, Support Ring requires embedded Ring in C/C++ code then extending Dart with this C/C++ code - So many layers :D

Greetings,

Mahmoud

[Anthony Souls]

Thanks, I didn't know it was so complicated. I will stick to reading more of the documentation, lol :) 

[Mohamed AbdElhalim]

"You would be better off avoiding downloading Android Studio to build a Ring application for mobile devices, as that editor does not support devices with performance close to average. This was an issue I did not expect to encounter."