Thanks for the reply and apols -- no hard feelings. At least the new Dart compiler generates nice JS, and the future efforts on Dart and JS look more aligned.

Thanks for the reply and apols -- no hard feelings. At least the new Dart compiler generates nice JS, and the future efforts on Dart and JS look more aligned. We still don't have a bignum champion in TC39, but we do have great SIMD championing from John McCutchan (who started it) and Daniel Ehrenberg of Google; Dan Gohman of Mozilla; Peter Jensen, et al., of Intel; and others at Microsoft whose names I'm not remembering. This leads to value types as an extension mechanism, so we should get bignums sooner or later. On whether DartVM was justified as a hedge against Java going away on Google, I've heard that too, but both for Java on the Google server side and for Android Java, I have never seen any evidence to support this notion. I'd want to see an efficient AOT compiler from Java classfiles to Dart, for example. Another example: some convincing work on library/framework parity on the server side to go along with Dart's (very nice) DOM and client side libraries. Perhaps such work was kept behind firewalls. If instead it was just a case of saying "oh, we may be able to use DartVM if things go south with Oracle", that velleity hardly counts as an intentional, operational Java replacement strategy.