State Management similar to SwiftUI

[Chandram-Dutta]

right now, things like TextField and NavigationSplitView depends on TextController and ValueNotifier. ik this is a rewrite of flutter in swift, but wouldn't it be better to replace them with something like @State or Observation Framework...

[xtyxtyx]

Totally agree with you that something like @State is absolutely better.

Currently things like "TextController" are intentionally kept to make it easier to port Flutter framework code to Shaft.

And there is some challenges in adopting @State. As far as I know the SwiftUI @State is implemented with some internal APIs and memory hacks that can be complex to replicate.

I'm actively exploring potential workarounds for this. And any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[n7trd]

And any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

This could be interesting, especially the state management part:
https://git.aparoksha.dev/aparoksha/meta/src/branch/main

// State management example from the site:

struct SearchView: View {

    @State private var count = 0

    var view: Body {
        Button(icon: .minus) {
            count -= 1
        }
        Text("\(count)")
        Button(icon: .plus) {
            count += 1
        }
    }

}

It's part of the Aparoksha project for cross-platform apps that uses native widgets, but it could be beneficial to share code that is important regardless of how widgets are rendered.

[natinusala]

One of my Swift experimentations is (was?) a framework to write Flutter apps in Swift, with a SwiftUI-like DSL. It currently has @State and @Environment. I was able to make my demo run on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux (basically all platforms supported by Swift).

The demo, which is a direct port of the Flutter demo, looks like this: https://github.com/natinusala/WidgeteerDemo/blob/master/lib/Sources/WidgeteerDemo/WidgeteerDemo.swift

If you look at the repo, you'll notice that this is actually a Swift library wrapped in a Flutter app. Everything you see inside the demo is bridged to Dart / Flutter under the hood. This is not transpilation, everything is bridged dynamically at runtime from Swift to Dart and back. Which makes it very inefficient but that's besides the point.

Anyway, this could be used as a base for a "SwiftUI-like wrapper around Flutter" for Shaft. The framework is available here: https://github.com/natinusala/Widgeteer

It has a Dart part and a Swift part, and a whole lot of code generation for the glue between them. It's been a while since I've worked on it but I can try to explain how it works if you want.

I'm sure a better approach can be found for Shaft though, since we can edit the "Flutter" part to accomodate for the SwiftUI DSL. Which I didn't want to do with Flutter (I wanted it to work on a stock Flutter distribution). Names could probably be changed too, State is fine but Environment might be weird in a Flutter context. This was pre-macros too, stuff could be improved using macros (Runtime usages can be replaced for example).