LV-Native ElixirConf2023 Talk - will it be cheaper?

Exited to see the good progress the team made!

Here is the talk:

It is now becoming more clear for me what LVN will become. Right now if you look at the docs you get the impression that you’ll have to build templates for all clients in parallel. But Brian points out that we may soon have a “singular styling framework” (29:30) for all clients.

It’s still a little hard to imagine. When looking at the examples he gives in the video at 26:30, we see that the bold-class is manually implemented in a function. The very different approaches to styling the different clients take, will also be a challenge. swiftui modifiers being one and what more surprises will the others bring?

Anyway - if they find a way - this will be amazing. And this will answer the key question he brings up at the end (48:45): Will it be cheaper?. Right now I can build an app for all the platforms using flutter. That’s including embedded-linux. No other tool can do that now (in this quality). So when I get an estimate now for an app that runs on

  • web
  • Android
  • i/mac/tv-OS
  • linux

Brian will not be able to be 40% cheaper than flutter. But I think that if LVN can provide all the clients one needs it will be even more than 40% cheaper, especially if you got a small Elixir-focused team.

It also seems to me, with the LVN-approach it will eventually be easier to support more clients than flutter. For example it seems feasible to create a Qt Quick Ultralite client which would enable LVN on very small microcontrollers (flutter cant and never will).

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