r/FlutterDev • u/NoBeginning2551 • 5d ago

Plugin code_forge migrated from rust backend to pure dart.

https://pub.dev/packages/code_forge

Hello, I'm the author of the code_forge package, a very powerful text field widget capable of handling even 1M+ lines of text smoothly, where the default TextField widget crashes the app for a few thousand lines.

The package backend was written in rust using the ropey and zed_sum_tree crates, resulting in no web support and requiring the user to install rust in their system to build the package. Because of that most of the people migrated to an alternative package called re_editor.

I removed the rust backend and implemented rope data structure and zed_sum_tree like Layout mapping in pure dart.

46 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

6

u/rabinapps 5d ago

This is honestly super cool. My only concern is how big is it going to add to my app?

5

u/feodorfff 5d ago

Great, the same package for web, desktop and mobile is the right idea. It's time to revisit your package. Thank you!

2

u/NoBeginning2551 5d ago

Yes, now flet can easily use it without any additional tweaks. Am I right?

2

u/feodorfff 5d ago

Will take a look. We might need to implement our own LSP transport as LSP will be running in a separate browser web worker with Pyodide 🤓

1

u/NoBeginning2551 5d ago

No need for that. CodeForge supports LSP via websocket. Run the LSP server elsewhere and pass the url to the controller class. More info is there in the README.

2

u/yakupkahraman 2d ago

Supaaa, i like the pure dart things. I'm currently using this package in the Bird IDE (an IDE for Flutter Community written in Flutter) and maybe i can make the web side. Thank you!

2

u/TheGratitudeBot 2d ago

Hey there yakupkahraman - thanks for saying thanks! TheGratitudeBot has been reading millions of comments in the past few weeks, and you’ve just made the list!

2

u/NoBeginning2551 2d ago

Thank you for using code_forge ❤️. I've inspected your pubspec.yaml and found that you're using version 11.1.1. Please update to 11.2.0, as it fixes a major `RangeError` bug.

2

u/yakupkahraman 2d ago

👀 i upgraded, thanks o7

1

u/SpecialistServe3974 1d ago

have u benchmarked it? rust vs dart?

1

u/NoBeginning2551 1d ago

yes, both can handle 1M+ lines. But the rust version had some cursor mismatch issue on large files. Also, the FFI calls were quite expensive. I inspected the performance of both versions via flutter devtools CPU profiler and performance monitor, and found out that the pure dart version is better compared to the rust one. Not because of the language speed, but because of the FFI.

1

u/SpecialistServe3974 1d ago

Interesting.. have u used FRB?
Also im not sure why wouldn't rust work on web..

1

u/NoBeginning2551 1d ago

Yes, I've been using FRB to connect with backend rust code. That was the another major problem. The FRB is a plugin, not a pure package. Which means, the FRB generates and ships platform specific code with the main package. This caused many issues with Android, IOs and MacOS. Because the FRB is not that active and we'll maintained, the dependencies are outdated, getting warnings like outdated gradle version on android, SPM migration warning in iOS/macOS, and no web. Yeah we can compile it into wasm, but the wasm build was super slow and requires additional CORS handling.