Hacker News: eseidel

New comment by eseidel in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2026)"

eseidel — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:43:07 +0000

Flutter is used by millions of devs (and nearly ⅓ of free apps submitted to AppStore), but is missing services for businesses. I built Flutter at Google. Now we’ve built a company selling services to 1000s of Flutter-using businesses globally, on track to profitability this year.

We serve 100s of millions of devices from our cloud, (2k+ RPS sustained), built mostly in Dart on Google Cloud + CloudFlare. We’re in the process of launching a series of CI offerings and have a lot of cloud development work ahead of us. You need production cloud experience, want to work at a startup, and be up for the challenge of owning, developing, and expanding Shorebird’s cloud infrastructure and backend services including code, configuration, architecture, and more. Previous Dart experience is not required.

We’re a small, senior team, making something people want. Tech: GCP, Cloudflare, Dart, Postgres, a little React & Node. Shorebird operates almost entirely in the public over Discord. https://discord.gg/shorebird

https://shorebird.dev/jobs

New comment by eseidel in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)"

eseidel — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 02:47:45 +0000

Flutter/Shorebird founder here. Flutter is used by millions of devs (and nearly ⅓ of free apps submitted to AppStore), but is missing services for businesses. We offer Flutter-related SAAS used by 1000s businesses globally, on track to profitability mid 2026.

https://shorebird.dev/jobs

New comment by eseidel in "Skip is now free and open source"

eseidel — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 17:23:35 +0000

Former Flutter Director, Shorebird founder here. Yes, that matches my understanding. The layoffs happened after I left Google, but yes Google appears to have simply off-shored the infrastructure (build and release) team.

New comment by eseidel in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2026)"

eseidel — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:13:59 +0000

As part of our over-the-air updates “code push” product, we’ve built a custom compiler and runtime for the Dart language, primarily written by me (founder/CEO). We need a fulltime engineer to take over primary responsibility for all of our C++ code (Dart & Flutter forks, custom runtime, compiler, etc.) and evolve it further than I could alone. You don’t need to be a compiler/runtime expert. You do need to be capable of working on large open source projects, be comfortable with C++, want to work at a startup, work well independently (we’re remote) and want to learn and work on lots of different areas of code. If you’ve contributed at least a little to WebKit, Godot, Firefox, or any other open source project and are at least compiler/runtime curious, you will likely find this role extremely rewarding.

For our second role: we serve 10s of millions of devices daily from our cloud, (2k+ RPS sustained), built mostly in Dart on Google Cloud + CloudFlare. We’re in the process of launching a CI product and have a lot of cloud development work ahead of us. You need some cloud experience, want to work at a startup, and be willing to work in Dart (what our customers use).

We’re a small, senior team, making something people want. Tech: GCP, Cloudflare, React, Dart, C++, Rust. Shorebird operates almost entirely in the public over Discord. https://discord.gg/shorebird

https://shorebird.dev/jobs

New comment by eseidel in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2025)"

eseidel — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 21:48:33 +0000

As part of our over-the-air updates “code push” product, we’ve built a custom compiler and runtime for the Dart language, primarily written by me (founder/CEO). Now that we have thousands of customers, I have many other responsibilities and need to bring on a fulltime engineer (you!) to take over primary responsibility for all of our C++ code (Dart & Flutter forks, custom runtime, compiler, etc.) and evolve it further than I could alone. Together, you and I will add obfuscation, improve our interpreter, possibly re-write method dispatch, etc. You don’t need to be a compiler/runtime expert. You do need to be capable of working on large open source projects, be comfortable with C++, want to work at a startup, work well independently (we’re remote) and want to learn and work on lots of different areas of code.

If you’ve contributed at least a little to WebKit, Godot, Firefox, or any other large open source project, are compiler/runtime curious, and want to work at a growing startup, you will likely find this role extremely rewarding.

We’re a small, senior team, making something people want. Tech: GCP, Cloudflare, React, Dart, C++, Rust. Shorebird operates almost entirely in the public over Discord. https://discord.gg/shorebird

https://shorebird.dev/jobs

New comment by eseidel in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025)"

eseidel — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:16:38 +0000

We’re a small, senior team, making something people want. Tech: GCP, Cloudflare, React, Dart. Shorebird operates almost entirely in the public over Discord. https://discord.gg/shorebird

https://shorebird.dev/jobs

New comment by eseidel in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2025)"

eseidel — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 15:27:18 +0000

Flutter/Shorebird founder here. Flutter is used by millions of devs (and nearly ⅓ of free apps submitted to AppStore), but is missing services for businesses. We sell Flutter-related Saas to 1000s businesses globally, on track to profitability early 2026. Need your help to build more products for Flutter developers.

We’re a small, senior team, making something people want. Tech: Dart, GCP, Cloudflare, React, C++. Shorebird operates almost entirely in the public over Discord. https://discord.gg/shorebird

https://shorebird.dev/jobs

New comment by eseidel in "Dart Macros and Focus"

eseidel — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 16:14:22 +0000

Google announced 2 years ago they would be adding "macros" support to the Dart language. They stopped that work yesterday. As former Eng Director of Dart (and co-founder of Flutter) I've offered my hot-take.

Dart Macros and Focus

eseidel — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 16:14:22 +0000

Article URL: https://shorebird.dev/blog/dart-macros/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42879145

Points: 25

# Comments: 13

New comment by eseidel in "An update on Dart macros and data serialization"

eseidel — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 05:32:15 +0000

I agree, Dart's public-facing codegen system (build_runner) leaves a lot to be desired. (In part the problem is that Dart uses a separate system inside Google.)

However, this is a topic of active work for the Dart team: https://github.com/dart-lang/build/issues/3800. I'm sure they would welcome your feedback, particularly if you have examples you can share.

You're also always welcome to reach out to me if you have Flutter/Dart concerns. I founded the Flutter project (and briefly led the Dart team) and care a great deal about customer success with both. eric@shorebird.dev reaches me.

New comment by eseidel in "An update on Dart macros and data serialization"

eseidel — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 02:03:38 +0000

I'm not sure what that would look like. Flutter mostly written in Dart itself (the framework, tooling, etc). The Flutter Engine (C++) is probably less than 1/3rd of Flutter, but could certainly be made portable to other languages if that were useful, but I suspect said languages would just fork it or write their own.

New comment by eseidel in "An update on Dart macros and data serialization"

eseidel — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:12:59 +0000

We considered Go! At the time it was much more designed for servers than mobile devices. If I recall correctly the minimum binary size was like 30mb or something.

New comment by eseidel in "An update on Dart macros and data serialization"

eseidel — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:11:32 +0000

I think you're not wrong about JS target being unnecessarily limiting. The problem is that a 250B/year business is written on top of Dart's JS transpiler (Google Ads) so it seems unlikely to be removed from the language anytime soon (maybe Dart2Wasm could allow that?).

It's pretty neat that Dart's JS support means you can take your code (e.g Flutter app) to the web, but I think that whole aspect of the ecosystem is underexplored/underdeveloped as of yet.

New comment by eseidel in "An update on Dart macros and data serialization"

eseidel — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 23:26:35 +0000

Makes sense. Google is a very large and diverse place. (And sometimes a lot of unpleasant infighting and politicking around tech choices.)

New comment by eseidel in "An update on Dart macros and data serialization"

eseidel — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 23:23:48 +0000

We started Flutter in 2014 and made the decision to switch to Dart in ~Jan 2015 iirc.

New comment by eseidel in "An update on Dart macros and data serialization"

eseidel — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 23:22:53 +0000

I don't have a full answer for you, but I know a little. I've hacked on the Dart compiler some, but my relationship with Dart has mostly been as a creator of Flutter and briefly Eng Dir for the Dart project.

Dart has multiple layers where it does tree shaking.

The first one is when building the "dill" (dart intermediate language) file, which is essentially the "front-end" processing step of the compiler which takes .dart files and does amount of processing. At that step things like entire unused libraries and classes are removed I believe.

When compiling to an ahead of time compiled binary (e.g. for releasing to iOS or Android) Dart does additional steps where it collects a set of roots and walks from those roots to related objects in the graph and discards all the rest. Not unlike a garbage collection. There are several passes of this for different parts of the compile, including as Dart is even writing the binary it will drop things like class names for unused classes (but keep their id in the snapshot so as not to re-number all the other classes).

I have no experience with tree shaking in the dart2js compiler, but there are experts on Discord who might be able to answer: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/blob/master/docs/contribu...

What exactly all this means as a dev using Dart, I don't know. In general I just assume the tree shaking works and ignore it. :)

The Dart tech lead has done some writings, but none seem to cover the exact details of treeshaking: https://mrale.ph/dartvm/ https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/blob/main/runtime/docs/READ...

New comment by eseidel in "An update on Dart macros and data serialization"

eseidel — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 23:13:49 +0000

Typescript is great! But doesn't get you away from running in a JS interpreter or JIT, which at least on iOS is very slow. We wrote the first 3 versions of Flutter in JS but eventually had to move off due to 10s+ startup times (we wrote a ton of JS). Once we moved to an ahead-of-time compiled language we could write as much code as we wanted and the user didn't have to compile it during launch on their device. Typescript would have that problem still today, sadly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqGAC5QCYuQ is a talk where we discuss what led to modern Flutter (including 3 attempts in JS).

Angular was originally in Dart is my understanding, but eventually forked into two projects. Angular Dart (which is really only still used internally at Google, mostly for Google AdWords which makes all the money) and Angular JS which is what has seen so much popularity more generally.

New comment by eseidel in "An update on Dart macros and data serialization"

eseidel — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 23:04:25 +0000

They talk about it some in the post, but my understanding is they're going to see if the can solve some of the motivating problems (e.g. json serialization) with simpler one-off solutions rather than a big general language feature.

New comment by eseidel in "An update on Dart macros and data serialization"

eseidel — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 23:02:35 +0000

Yeah. Dart's over-rotation on generated code is a googlism. They have a fancy build setup internally which is very good at generated code and caching it.

I know that the build_runner authors are looking into perf as we speak, and I'd be happy to put you in touch with them if you'd like to speak with them about debugging your case: https://github.com/dart-lang/build/issues/3800

eric@shorebird.dev reaches me (for this or any other Flutter/Shorebird issue).

New comment by eseidel in "An update on Dart macros and data serialization"

eseidel — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 23:00:04 +0000

[Flutter founder here.]

I'm pretty sure we did look at C# (and certainly a whole bunch of other languages). I don't actually recall why we didn't use C# at the time. I remember Go binaries were waaay to big, JS (what we originally wrote Flutter in) startup time was way too slow on iOS, Swift was too deeply tied to Apple (the standard library was closed source at that time), etc. It's possible that C# was too verbose or didn't have a path to hot reload? But that's just a guess. I'm not a C# expert, and Adam Barth drove most of the language evals at the time.

That said, I'm also not sure Miguel (creator of Xamarin) would agree. He's a Flutter fan now (and backer of Shorebird, my company).

Past discussions: https://x.com/migueldeicaza/status/1778759403451081159 https://x.com/migueldeicaza/status/1559898665350832128