Dart was always designed to have its own VM. Compiling to Javascript was more of a necessary evil. Google's vision with respect to Dart in the browser was to ha

Dart was always designed to have its own VM. Compiling to Javascript was more of a necessary evil. Google's vision with respect to Dart in the browser was to have a more powerful VM rather than persistently piggybacking on a Javascript VM (this was what Dartium was about). Even now, the current VM supports state snapshotting, isolates, and native/transparent big integers [1], neither of which you can get out of a compiler that generates Javascript, unless the Javascript backend already supports it. Compilation to Javascript is still possible and useful, but you inevitably lose some Dart VM features in the process. Ironically, Ceylon now supports a Dart backend. In short, Dart is both a language and a platform, though the language can also be used to target other platforms. [1] In general, it's pretty obvious that several of the Dart developers have a Smalltalk background.