Using Dart FFI for Compute-Heavy Tasks
summary
Dart FFI calls C code to speed compute-heavy image routines, using native heap shared memory to avoid costly copies and FFI gen + plugin templates to integrate builds; transferable_type_data and isolate ports prove too slow. Benchmarks on a pixel‑art editor show C alone is ~5x faster in microbenchmarks but real gains: premultiplied alpha reaches SIMD + threading speedups up to 20× on iOS and 13× on Android. Native finalizers handle cleanup; implementations compile and run in Flutter.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Dart FFI introduction
- 1:07What is Dart FFI
- 3:18Dart isolates limitations
- 7:13FFI trade-offs
- 9:48Performance gains from C
- 10:51FFI packages setup
- 16:13Manual FFI example
- 19:48Native finalizers
- 22:17Modern FFI annotations
- 25:37Flutter FFI plugin
- 28:49Performance benchmarks
- 36:39Q&A
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