Is it too late to talk about late?

If you've been working with Flutter for a while you probably have something like the next snippet somewhere in your code

class _MyWidgetState extends State<MyWidget>
    with SingleTickerProviderStateMixin {
 
   late AnimationController _controller;

   @override
   void initState() {
      _controller = AnimationController(vsync: this);
   }
}

But did you know that you can:

late x;
//...
x = 'something';
x = 'something else';

I sure didn't. Somehow I was sure that it was the same as marking the member as `final`. So if you were surprised by this incredible discovery, here's what you should be doing:

late final x;
//...
x = 'something';
x = 'something else'; // this is now an error, enforced by the analyzer

There is another interesting interaction with `late`. Lazy initialization.

If, for any reason, a member is expensive to initialize and you rather do that operation only when and if it is first accessed. You can use:

late final x = SomeExpensiveClass();

And get this. Because this is called after the parent class was initialized, you can call on members of the parent class (and even methods)

late final x = SomeExpensiveClass(this.otherField);

Though I still can't find a good "every day" example for the lazy init in Flutter, so if someone has a good one to share with me, let me know.