Jeff Ward

Senior Software Engineer, Datadog

Jeff is a former game developer, mobile engineer, and manager who now specializes in doing fun things with Dart and Flutter, including personal projects embedding Dart into game engines. At Datadog, he leads the development of the Datadog Flutter SDK.

Binding Native Plugins with Flutter and Dart

Sometimes in Flutter, you need to access a native system, library, or API that doesn’t already have a Pub package available to you, so you have to bind it yourself. Dart and Flutter provide several different methods for leveraging native libraries and APIs: Method Channels, JS Interop, FFI to C, FFI gen to Swift and Objective-C, and JNIgen. Which one is right for your use case? This talk will take a look at the various methods for plugin development, their benefits and drawbacks, and some gotchas you might run into when developing complex plugins.