Using Dart FFI for Compute-Heavy Tasks
summary
Dart FFI plus native C code is used to speed pixel‑art algorithms (alpha premultiplication, flood fill) in a Flutter plugin built with dart:ffi and the ffi_gen toolchain (CMake/gradle, iOS podspec). Benchmarks show FFI cuts runtime by ~45–63% versus pure Dart, multithreaded C reaches ~80% reduction (~5×), SIMD single‑thread yields ≈10× on iOS, and combined SIMD+threads yields ~20× speedup on iOS and ~13× on Android. Native finalizers and platform/architecture differences require manual memory management and measurement.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Dart FFI introduction
- 1:48Dart FFI use cases
- 3:03Dart isolates limits
- 6:18Platform channels limits
- 7:23Advantages and drawbacks of Dart FFI
- 9:27Performance benchmarks
- 10:30Setting up FFI
- 13:20FFI struct example
- 18:43String memory in FFI
- 20:50FFI Flutter plugin
- 22:38Flutter plugin structure
- 25:08Alpha premultiplication gains
- 27:58Flatfield algorithm perf
- 29:04Multithreading optimization
- 30:10SIMD speed boost
- 32:37GPU overhead
- 33:41Final performance results
- 34:03Q&A
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