Spotted ConstraintLayout in Compose: https://android-review.googlesource.com/c/platform/frameworks/support/+/1137175

Is this to flatten views? Or are there any other reasons behind the development of such layout?

It's because there are cases where using constraints is more practical, especially if you one day migrate from

View

based

ConstraintLayout

Constraint imho completely destroy the idea of a UI tree, you end up having a parent with tons of children and no hierarchy 🙂

Completely? I don't think so! Also, use the right tool for the job.

Well, having a constraint layout allows you to have all the view as siblings 🙂

It's a question of how you're expressing your layouts and code, not just the final tree shape. But since Compose emits nodes of the layout tree independent of the composable function call tree you can still introduce intermediate abstractions where it makes sense

Will there be a visual layout editor as well working with

Compose

? Something like

Apple

shown for

SwiftUI

?

you mean something like Android Studio has had since ConstraintLayout first released? 😄

No, I mean visually seeing edits from Jetpack Compose code to a visual editor and viceversa

We've got a lot of ideas, but I'll let the part of the team directly working on those things talk more about them if they're ready to 🙂

Force them by tagging them 😈

I use ConstraintLayout without the layout editor, it's a "product" too. I got a bunch of extensions that cut a lot of verbosity and enable more reuse despite the flat hierarchy.

visual layout editor never worked in complex cases 😄. Do we still have plans for instant update on emulator/device? just like the experience with flutter? I think that would be a way bigger impact than keeping alive the visual editor and lot of people are looking forward to it