I do really like compose, but if it gets delivered...

# compose

[mattinger]

I do really like compose, but if it gets delivered with the preview as broken as it is now, it’s going to end up DOA.

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

Both compose itself and the IDE support are in alpha/canary, by definition things are not ready to ship.

[mattinger]

I get that, but the preview is really horribly broken at this point.

[mattinger]

It’s been that way for a while now. I would have thought it would at least be mostly working now. Sadly it is not.

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

I mean, everything is still in alpha, nothing is guaranteed to work correctly.

[Halil Ozercan]

I remember when Flutter hit v1 and it was met with harsh criticism. People were saying that it wasn't stable or performant enough to be accepted as a cross-platform solution from Google. I'm not going to say that they were totally wrong. However, seeing what Flutter had become by time, I have really high confidence that Jetpack Compose is going to have even better performance(native) and tooling(android studio) when it's ready.

Let's not get hopeless when we are at alpha03 🙂

[Halil Ozercan]

And the thing about previews is that they are really difficult in declarative frameworks. SwiftUI is basically leveraging a fast Simulator on Mac (I might be wrong on this one. It's just a gross simplification). For react and others on web, "browser+hot reloading" is your best friend. For Android, it's a bit challenging. Emulators are not fast enough, drawing previews from functional components are tricky.

[mbonnin]

They'll "just" have to make compose work on Desktop and there'll be instant preview 😉

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

I've seen a few CLs about something called "live literals", which seems to be a thing where the compiler replaces literals in composable code with basically `MutableState`s for running in (I assume) the preview, and then presumably detects when you change those literal values and pushes only the changed values to the running code without requiring a rebuild of the whole module. Or at least that's what it looked like it was supposed to do. Nobody has talked about it publicly that I've seen, so idk if it's even real 😂

[Jeremy]

preview wfm in alpha03, is there any specific issues?

[Jeremy]

As others have noted its alpha and we're the testers. We're also all developers. If find issues file appropriate bugs, test cases with instructions to reproduce will help fix faster