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 i

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.