Build hooks and code assets support in Dart standalone is available since Dart 3.10.

Ongoing work for tree-shaking and other features related to hooks can be tracked in: Native Assets

This is a high level "feature" issue that we can refer to from various places.

The current way of bundling native code with Dart packages is far from ideal, we will introduce "Native Assets" to Dart.

Problem

As of right now, one can do one (or more) of the following:

1. ship sources in a Dart standalone package and let users run a build by calling dart run <your-package>/setup.dart see webcrypto, or
2. make your bin/setup.dart download the native library, or
3. ship sources a flutter plugins with flutter create --template=plugin_ffi --platform=..., or
4. ship a script that downloads the native library during flutter build see realm_flutter.

This leads to pain for both package developers (options 1-4) and package users (option 1-2). Moreover, there is currently no way to make a package with native code that works both for flutter and Dart standalone.

High level solution

We introduce the concept of "Native Assets" to the Dart eco system.

A native asset is a native library (compiled from native source code).

Three components of the "Native Assets" solution in Dart:

1. A standardized way to build or download native assets. This will be done by a CLI.
2. A transparent way to find native symbols in these native assets in Dart.
3. Integration with all the dart and flutter tooling to link the above two together.

Try now

Native assets support in Dart standalone is available in Dart 3.2 behind an experimental flag : dart --enable-experiment=native-assets run [path/to/script.dart].

Native assets support in Flutter is in development. Progress can be tracked in flutter/flutter#129757.

An example on how to use native assets can be found here.

Checklist

• Basic Dart support: [vm/ffi] Native asset resolution by the Dart VM for FfiNatives #49803
• Flutter support: ☂️ Build hooks & Code assets flutter/flutter#129757
• Refine core support:
  • [vm/ffi] Make FfiNatives more concise #50097
  • Allow access to global variables in ffi static binding #50551
  • Allow getting address of native symbols when using static ffi binding #50552
  • [ffi] tree-shaking does not remove dependency .so library from the build #52970
  • [vm/ffi] Explore using FfiNative for static linking #49418
  • dart compile exe support static linking of C code #47718
  • [vm/ffi] FfiNative return types treatment inconsistent with asFunction #49518
  • [native_assets][resource_identifiers] Deferred loading and assets #55809
  • [native_assets] Support dart pub global run #56044
  • [native_assets] Hot restart native libs #55850
• Graduate out from experiment flag (--enable-experiment=native-assets)