Thank you for Squirrel as well!

The Gleam community is generally very very nice. I maintain about 200k lines of Gleam[0][1], and they have generally accommodated even my stupidest posts on Discord.

The language itself is as welcoming. Even LLMs are less cranky and output nicer code, not having to deal with React.

[0]: https://blisswriter.app/

[1]: https://nestful.app/

I appreciate the aside. Interesting observation

Does anyone know if the original promise of their simple layout model proved itself?

IIRC, the Flutter team mentioned how using just width/height constraints is enough to represent all relevant layouts. This sounds very nice, being so much simpler than Flexbox and miles ahead of CSS Grid ergonomics.

Did it live up to the promise or did they expand the model with Flex/Grid/etc?

It's much easier to fix flutter layout issues than CSS on web in my experience.

The web almost got constraint based layout. Well maybe almost is too strong, but it was a candidate. CCSS.

We got tables and floats instead.

The premise is a bit off. Flutter was never just width/height: the model is min/max box constraints. The core rule is: constraints go down, sizes come up, parent sets position.

Row and Column are just layout algorithms built on that same model, not separate engines added later. GridView uses the sliver system internally, but still doesn't require anything like CSS Grid's general layout model. The render API is open enough for custom layouts too, so packages like https://pub.dev/packages/boxy build directly on it

What's the state of FOSS licensing compliance? Have they repented?

Mikrotik's FOSS story is as bad.

Do expand

They don't release / host source code unless formally asked