New post on /r/flutterdev subreddit:
<b>Flutter is no longer safe for production</b>
I have basically read though all the discussions about this topic on Reddit and GitHub.When it was first found, the initial communication was promising with whispers of a fix out by December 2020. But now it's nearly March 2021, this issue is been talked about more frequently on Reddit and has also skyrocketed to one of the most popular issues on the GitHub in less than a few days.Regarding <a href="
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/76180">this viral github issue</a>, it's obvious that comments would probably get locked because there were a lot of people voicing their opinions. However, it was the final question and response which told me everything I need to know about the state of Flutter at the moment.The last question on the issue (<a href="
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/76180#issuecomment-781905393">link</a>): 31👍 7 ❤️Would you be able to put out a roadmap with timeline? It took only 2 days for this to reach top 10 liked issues which perhaps tells how eagerly folks are waiting for a fix. We all love Flutter (and its promises) and appreciate the work you guys are doing, but this issue prevents anybody serious from releasing to app stores. I think most of us were happy to see Google Pay adopt Flutter, but super disappointed with its janky launch performance on iOS.This issue needs full force of the Flutter team. And a roadmap with timeline would give clarity and reassurance.The Flutter team (<a href="/u/Hixie">/u/Hixie</a>) responded with this (<a href="
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/76180#issuecomment-782587328">link</a>), then locked the issue:That's... not how engineering works. Sorry. This is an architectural issue, it's not something that can be trivially patched in a few hours. We're going to design solutions, test them, deploy them, but it will take some time... and there's no way to know how much time. Roadmaps and timelines could only be misleading.For what it's worth, we've been studying this problem seriously for the better part of a year now (you can see some of our past efforts e.g. in <a href="
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/60267">#60267</a> and other issues), and even before that we've considered the issue of first-launch jank to be a serious one, hence our attempts to address it with shader warm-up, first manually then <a href="
https://flutter.dev/docs/perf/rendering/shader">automatically</a>. We've also been working closely with the GPay team to improve their performance, and we look forward to their next release (these efforts have already paid off in the Android version of GPay in the Play store, though we have not yet had a chance to deploy a new iOS version). All of this means that we have already studied a number of options and learnt much from this; the more we learn, the closer we get to a long-term sustainable solution.What's really helpful is to have concrete cases that we can study. This bug is one of the only actionable issues with actual steps to reproduce, code that we can study, to have been filed. If you want to help, but are not a graphics expert, then the best thing you can do is create tiny, simple, sample apps like <a href="
https://github.com/danReynolds">
@danReynolds</a>', showing specific cases of jank that are reproducible and that can be studied "in the lab". When we have studied jank issues, such as those in GPay, we have found that there are a multitude of causes -- some easy to solve by tweaking build methods, other (such as the one here) that highlight complicated interactions in Skia. Only by having actual test cases can we really fix these issues.Commenting on this bug is highly unlikely to help unless you are actively working with the team to resolve this specific issue. I'm going to lock this bug to people with <a href="
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Contributor-access">contributor access</a> only to help us stay focused…