Fixes #7793.

This machinery is useful for arbitrary boxes (e.g., with FittedBox).

Fixes #6463

Fixes #6382

The excellent `local-history` plugin for vscode, saves history in `.history` files; this ignores them.

See: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=xyz.local-history

Fixes: #8783

Fixes #8850

Breaking change: removed deprecated methods of PlatformMessages, leaving only binary messaging there. All other use of platform communication now goes through PlatformMessageChannel and PlatformMethodChannels. Retained use of String and JSON codecs for now.

Companion engine PR: flutter/engine#3482

Fixes #8821

The problem has been fixed upstream in the Dart VM.

This simplifies our setup instructions on Windows (will update the wiki).
Furthermore, this also means that going forward there is no diffrence between PowerShell and Cmd for the Flutter experience on Windows.

Function keys don't work great on any platform we support:
* Mac doesn't have first-class function keys.
* On Ubuntu: F1 opens the system help and F10 opens the file dialog.
* ... and Windows is a mess as well.

It's no longer needed with the latest Dart SDK roll.

Fixes: https://github.com/flutter/flutter-intellij/issues/808

Fixes: #8812

* Only run pod install if CocoaPods v1.0.0 or greater is installed.

Avoid issues with older versions of CocoaPods breaking the build. Users who genuinely use older versions of CocoaPods will have to run pod install manually when required.

* Update iOS part of flutter_view to use the new platform message channel

* remove newline

* comments

* devicelab benchmarks run on Windows

* fix analyzer issue

* fix test

* fix pubspec

- [x] Don't use package:stack_trace.
- [x] Don't use Chain.capture.
- [x] Fix an instance of aggressive catching of exceptions

Related #8742

Fixes #6207