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Well, I guess Google had to find something to use the Dart VM for now that they aren't trying to cram into Chrome anymore. Some interesting ideas here, though.

Well, I guess Google had to find something to use the Dart VM for now that they aren't trying to cram into Chrome anymore. Some interesting ideas here, though. It's strange how much it looks like web development, with route handling for navigation etc.

moonchrome 11y ago
Dart has such a strange story. When it started out it was completely uninteresting as a language and it's only selling feature was that it someday might find it's way in to browsers and that it compiles to JS. Now that it's ditched the whole "replace JS in browser" the language has actually matured enough to the point where I would code in it outside of browser use case and the VM quality puts it in a unique performance/productivity spot. It is very much a hybrid of C# and Python in good ways with a decent package manager built in. It's much more suitable to be viewed as a high performance Python replacement - unlike Go it's dynamically typed but offers optional static typing so the level of abstraction is much closer to Python - in fact I would argue that the static typing built in from start makes it more productive than python for project you need to scale up to multiple people. But it was built by a VM team that knows how to get performance and knows the bottlenecks that prevent JS optimizations - so it's probably faster than V8 and the likes - not CPyhon level. The VM/class library is small and embeddable which separates it from Java. And finally the compile to browser was a design choice from the start so compile to JS is much simpler than existing languages (eg. Python/Java) It's a great language for client side programming and it's usable in server side if you are already using it for client side and want same languages on both server and client.
- randomfool 11y ago
  Dart is still much much closer to JS than C#, specifically in terms of threading, native interop, value types, etc. Until these are all improved I just don't see a compelling mobile story for Dart when compared to Java. Furthermore, TypeScript, Facebook's Flow etc provide stronger static analysis than Dart.
  - moonchrome 11y ago
    >specifically in terms of threading, native interop, value types, etc. AFAIK the VM they are working on for mobile has green threads (aka. isolates), value types are irrelevant at this level of coding and interop is arguably better than standard FFI with their IDL/IPC system. It's actually a perfect frontend language where you delegate stuff where you care about threads/memory layouts/performance/etc. to native code in whatever language that has bindings for their IDL. TypeScript, Flow, etc. are JS type systems - Dart is a programming language - it's superior to JS in that it has sane semantics and standard library/collections, etc. It also has stuff like async/await shipping for a long time now (still not in TS official).
discreteevent 11y ago
"It's strange how much it looks like web development" - It looks a bit like a browser for native app development. To me it looks like it could be the solution to a lot of problems. What is good about the web for applications is that it is write once run everywhere (because people do not expect a native look and feel) and also that it is zero install. What is bad about the web for applications it is that it is designed for content presentation and not applications. For mobile it has a number of things that limit it for performance. To get something to even approach decent performance I have to try to understand a complex and opaque machine called the browser. Compared to native app development this is a lot more difficult. The machine is working against me because its primary concern is document layout. So it looks to me like a browser for applications in resource constrained environments (mobile). I see nothing wrong with this; We used to have innovations like this all the time but since the browser came along its been a bit of a tyranny of orthodoxy. Why not have a browser for documents and a browser for applications? I certainly don't like web apps in my browser for content sites. (They don't work at all, or the scrolling is all over the place or they burn up my battery). For the moment though they seem to be clear that flutter is for application development on android and ios only and won't run everywhere. Plus Apple will probably never allow zero install (which knocks out half of my "browser for applications" theory, the other half being write once run anywhere)
untog 11y ago
It's strange how much it looks like web development I saw a talk that discussed this - it's deliberate. Flutter is intended to be a lot friendlier to web devs, to let them bridge the gap between mobile web and mobile native.

moonchrome 11y ago

Dart has such a strange story. When it started out it was completely uninteresting as a language and it's only selling feature was that it someday might find it's way in to browsers and that it compiles to JS. Now that it's ditched the whole "replace JS in browser" the language has actually matured enough to the point where I would code in it outside of browser use case and the VM quality puts it in a unique performance/productivity spot. It is very much a hybrid of C# and Python in good ways with a decent package manager built in. It's much more suitable to be viewed as a high performance Python replacement - unlike Go it's dynamically typed but offers optional static typing so the level of abstraction is much closer to Python - in fact I would argue that the static typing built in from start makes it more productive than python for project you need to scale up to multiple people. But it was built by a VM team that knows how to get performance and knows the bottlenecks that prevent JS optimizations - so it's probably faster than V8 and the likes - not CPyhon level. The VM/class library is small and embeddable which separates it from Java. And finally the compile to browser was a design choice from the start so compile to JS is much simpler than existing languages (eg. Python/Java) It's a great language for client side programming and it's usable in server side if you are already using it for client side and want same languages on both server and client.

randomfool 11y ago
Dart is still much much closer to JS than C#, specifically in terms of threading, native interop, value types, etc. Until these are all improved I just don't see a compelling mobile story for Dart when compared to Java. Furthermore, TypeScript, Facebook's Flow etc provide stronger static analysis than Dart.
- moonchrome 11y ago
  >specifically in terms of threading, native interop, value types, etc. AFAIK the VM they are working on for mobile has green threads (aka. isolates), value types are irrelevant at this level of coding and interop is arguably better than standard FFI with their IDL/IPC system. It's actually a perfect frontend language where you delegate stuff where you care about threads/memory layouts/performance/etc. to native code in whatever language that has bindings for their IDL. TypeScript, Flow, etc. are JS type systems - Dart is a programming language - it's superior to JS in that it has sane semantics and standard library/collections, etc. It also has stuff like async/await shipping for a long time now (still not in TS official).

discreteevent 11y ago

"It's strange how much it looks like web development" - It looks a bit like a browser for native app development. To me it looks like it could be the solution to a lot of problems. What is good about the web for applications is that it is write once run everywhere (because people do not expect a native look and feel) and also that it is zero install. What is bad about the web for applications it is that it is designed for content presentation and not applications. For mobile it has a number of things that limit it for performance. To get something to even approach decent performance I have to try to understand a complex and opaque machine called the browser. Compared to native app development this is a lot more difficult. The machine is working against me because its primary concern is document layout. So it looks to me like a browser for applications in resource constrained environments (mobile). I see nothing wrong with this; We used to have innovations like this all the time but since the browser came along its been a bit of a tyranny of orthodoxy. Why not have a browser for documents and a browser for applications? I certainly don't like web apps in my browser for content sites. (They don't work at all, or the scrolling is all over the place or they burn up my battery). For the moment though they seem to be clear that flutter is for application development on android and ios only and won't run everywhere. Plus Apple will probably never allow zero install (which knocks out half of my "browser for applications" theory, the other half being write once run anywhere)

untog 11y ago

It's strange how much it looks like web development I saw a talk that discussed this - it's deliberate. Flutter is intended to be a lot friendlier to web devs, to let them bridge the gap between mobile web and mobile native.