Flutter Forked: A New Era with Flock, a More Powerful and Open
The world of software development has just witnessed a major shakeup with the Flutter Foundation’s decision to fork Flutter, the popular open-source framework widely used by over a million developers worldwide. Originally developed and maintained by Google, Flutter has become a go-to framework for building cross-platform applications. However, despite its popularity, the Flutter team remains relatively small, and recent layoffs at Google have further strained the resources allocated to maintaining and evolving the framework.
The Motivation Behind the Fork
As an open-source project, Flutter relies on contributions from the developer community, which must be reviewed and validated by the core team before integration. With limited resources and a high volume of contributions, the Flutter team faces significant challenges in keeping up, highlighting the need for additional support. In response to these challenges, former Google team members who were closely involved with Flutter have taken an ambitious step: they decided to fork Flutter, creating a new language derived from it, called Flock.
Flock: An Enhanced and More Powerful Flutter
At its launch, Flock will be a complete copy of Flutter, but with the intention of delivering improved features and enhanced performance. This fork will include all current master and beta branches of Flutter and further develop the engine to offer a faster and more responsive alternative. Flock aims to speed up the contribution process, integrating new ideas more quickly and exploring solutions that the community wants but that may take time to be approved within Flutter.
The Benefits for the Community
With Flock, the Flutter team can focus on contributions that have already been tested and included in this derivative version, allowing them to select only the most stable and optimized features for Flutter. In essence, Flock will serve as an experimental lab for the original framework, where developers can test and refine new features without the constraints faced by the initial team.
This approach also promotes greater collaboration and gives more flexibility to external developers, enabling the community to shape the framework’s evolution with fewer limitations. Flock could quickly attract developers looking for a more innovative environment, where technological advancements are integrated more rapidly.
What’s Next for Flutter and Flock?
The launch of Flock marks the beginning of a new chapter for Flutter’s open-source development. This fork could redefine standards of performance and innovation for the framework, with the promise of providing an increasingly enriching development experience.
In conclusion, Flutter’s fork into Flock appears to be a milestone in the framework’s history, offering the potential for increased growth that will benefit both developers and the open-source ecosystem as a whole.
Personally, I’ve chosen to give the project some time to mature before getting involved. I prefer to observe its development and, if the opportunity arises, make a few small contributions that might be helpful.
✍️by Aghilas AZZOUG
Account linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azzougaghilas/
Sources : https://flutterfoundation.dev/blog/posts/we-are-forking-flutter-this-is-why/
