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Dart in 2016: Fastest growing language at Google, 2nd fastest in TIOBE
- xiphias 10y agoIt doesn't show how much Rust inproved in usage compared to last year.
- pistolfuck 10y agoProbably because it's failing and is mismanaged. Don't get me wrong, I hate dart almost as much as rust, but Gilad is a powerhouse and there's some interesting projects. All rust has is servo, a bunch of cucked-out communists, no standardization, etc.
- xiphias 10y agoWhy the downvote? Rust is on 41th place on the linked TIOBE index and I would expect it to be growing faster than Dart from the HN articles that were popular last year. Dart was compared to last year on the index, but Rust wasn't, so I don't think saying that Dart was the second fastest growing language is fair.
- steveklabnik 10y agoIt did say that, "Rust kept its top 50 position (from 47 to 41)." But also, Rust and Dart are very different languages, so bringing Rust up here feels very offtopic.
- xiphias 10y agoThanks, I didn't see it..I thought it's interesting because every few days there's a new library ported to Rust shown on HN, which gave the impression to me that it's the fastest growing language.
- steveklabnik 10y agoWell, TIOBE's rankings only prove what TIOBE's rankings say. You should examine their methodology and take it for whatever you think it's worth. It does a very specific kind of thing.
- pseudosavant 10y agoHere is their methodology FWIW: http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/ http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-defin... I don't know what they are really trying to measure but it seems pretty useless.
- dunkelheit 10y agoRust people are very good at marketing and community building and you have experienced it yourself. Which is a great thing, it would be sad for such a promising language to fail because "people just didn't get it".
- flukus 10y ago> Rust people are very good at marketing and community building and you have experienced it yourself. This is why languages succeed and fail, not technical merits.
- andrewbinstock 10y agoAt HN, we're a very small community in a very large profession. Viewing what that larger profession is doing based principally on what you see here is likely to be misleading.
- sushisource 10y agoAnd yet, I very very rarely hear anyone talking about it? I assume it's pushed heavily internally at Google, but anecdotally it seems nigh-unused outside of Google. Am I totally off?
- pistolfuck 10y agoAbsolutely. Reading HN is not a barometer for the real world.
- unknownsavage 10y agoYeah, this is my impression too. This is the first mention of it I think I've heard in the last year, and I'm in the web development scene. Meanwhile I seemingly can't get away from rust mentions, which seems to have people really excited.
- gcp 10y agoI have the impression that Dart's lunch got eaten by TypeScript. The latter is the preferred "improved" compile-to-JS language now, and the efforts to push a Dart VM didn't get any traction outside Google, whereas WebAssembly looks like it will be the new VM standard. Doesn't leave much for Dart.
- isoos 10y agoApparently there is at least one reddit moderator that doesn't like Dart and actively bans users when they try to post legitimate articles in webdev forums: https://plus.google.com/+MontyRasmussen/posts/UWyjF5S14Uo https://plus.google.com/+MontyRasmussen/posts/UWyjF5S14Uo I'm not saying that this is general to moderators, but some people try to deny it exists or is relevant (probably because they have invested in other toolchains), and if your filter-bubble is controlled by them, you will miss out.
- cutler 10y agoIndeed.com has 0 Dart jobs by title and TIOBE is a joke. Given that Google uses about 4 languages routinely (Go, Java, Python & Dart) this is nothing more than internal back-patting with no relevance outside the Googleplex.
- ndr 10y ago(..., Javascript, C++)
- devsquid 10y agoObjC (probably a little Swift just to test if its ready yet), C, and probably tons more like most huge tech companies :P
- pseudosavant 10y agoI don't want to dog on anyone's language, but any list that purports that Typescript is significantly less popular than Scheme, Haskell, Alice, Lisp, COBOL, Ada, Logo, and a few dozen other languages you probably haven't ever heard of, is a complete waste of time. I don't even use Typescript and even I know that especially with Angular 2 Typescript is gaining a lot of popularity and it was already doing well before they picked it too. I mean it isn't even on their list in the top 100. How is that possible? It says that VB.net is more popular than Javascript too. Like that is even possible.
- flukus 10y ago> I mean it isn't even on their list in the top 100. How is that possible? I'm guessing that most people would google "angular ..." instead of "typescript ...", that's why it doesn't show up in tiobe.
- myth_drannon 10y agoPascal is still top 20 on TIOBE and growing in popularity ... ok.
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- shavenwarthog2 10y agoDart's fascinating. It feels high level and object-oriented like Python, and can be used both web server- and client-side. Check it out!
- isoos 10y agoIf somebody has an interest on what's new with Dart, I'd suggest to peek into the Dart Developer Summit 2016 videos. Previous HN link and discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12838749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12838749 TL;DR: great developer tooling, hyper-focus on web and mobile.
- leftrightupdown 10y agoWe are writing spa frontend for email marketing service in dart. No angular, react, just lots of plain dart. Strong analyzer mode is used and dartium is always in checked mode. Dart shined most when we created drag and drop html editor. We like using it anl if anyone wants to know why we used dart ask for details. Check our app at listshine.com
- devsquid 10y agoYea I found just using plane Dart to work really well. I preferred it over Angular. I had an entire functioning web app in about 80kbs, including all images, html, css, and JS. That was a while back, I'm sure its only gotten better.
- leftrightupdown 10y agoWhat i personally liked is that we write once and in 99.9% cases generated js is compatible with all browsers. Also type checking and strong analyzer mode helped catch ton of bugs. Im sure if you bet your next project on this tech you wont be sorry. Fast code and fast development with webdev batteries included.
- devsquid 10y agoYea actually I forgot about how slow it was to compile to JS. They are saying it should around 100MS now to do a dev compile. So its feasible to use other browsers actively during development. That is probably the biggest thing for me they announced at the Dart Con.
- ceronman 10y agoYou don't always have to jump to the hype train! Yes, you don't hear much about Dart here on HN, but the project is far from dead. The most important thing is that Dart works, it's stable and production ready and it's being used in production not only by Google but also by other companies. Dart is a very refreshing change for front-end development. No fatigue! Great tooling, nice language without surprises and optional static typing. On the backend you get probably the fastests dynamic language out there, maybe competing only with LuaGIT. The new Flutter for high performance mobile app development looks seriously awesome. I specially love the instant live reloading. Dart's package ecosystem (pub.dartlang.org) seems healthy with constant updates and new packages. I have no idea how TIOBE works, but I find weird that people accuse Google of manipulating it to promote Dart. I believe it's the opposite, Google has done very little to promote Dart, and that's why you don't hear about it very often. I believe the project deserves more promotion because it's seriously good. Give it a try one of these days! EDIT: I do not work for Google
- devsquid 10y agoThe one issue I had with Dart, was typing was optional. But at the last DartCon they announced they are creating a strong typed mode, which forces typing and type correctness and it generates higher preforming code. Yay!
- leftrightupdown 10y agoi think strong typing generates same code as optional typing if you are not using dart dev compiler.
- devsquid 10y agoI think they mentioned some gains in the size of the compiled JS. I don't remember tho.
- dragonwriter 10y agoWhen you say the "dev compiler" are you referring to the DartVM? While (embedded in Dartium browser) that's used for dev convenience for front-end, it's also (without the browser, obviously) the main target for back end Dart.
- lacker 10y agoDart is also the 41st largest language on GitHub, growing slower than the average. http://githut.info/ http://githut.info/
- 13years 10y agoHowever, Dart didn't make the list for PYPL http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html http://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html or the RedMonk ranking, although this is 6 months ago. http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2016/07/20/language-rankings-6-16/ http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2016/07/20/language-rankings-6-16...
- kelvin0 10y agoOK, so I started dabbling with Dart and wanted I've been wanting to do this for 3 years. Please bear in mind, I want to use Dart because coding in JS directly is not something I thoroughly enjoyed the last time I built a 'real' Web App. This is not a critique of Dart, it's just my recent experience ... if any of the points I make here make no sense, please correct me (I really don't want to use JS anymore!) So I start by installing the Dart SDK on my Windows PC. First surprise, I noticed they no longer package the Dart-IDE when you install Dart SDK, a minor disappointment. But I get it, the Dart team explains they want to focus on core tools and let you use any editor (Web Storm is suggested but costs $$$, and remember I'm only scouting at this point). So decided to use the plugin for Dart in Sublime Text 3. Not perfect, but it works fairly well. Other surprise, Polymer seems to be fading away. What Widget framework shall I choose? I chose React for it's one way binding which seems to make sense to a web n00b like me, since it will simplify the flow of data. The Dart team pushes Angular really hard, but I still install the Dart-react modules. Adding dependencies to a Dart project is fairly straight forward so far. Using Dart-React does not bring the happy unicorns knocking at my door. Dart React does not (yet?) process JSX, which is a pretty big feature I intended to use with Dart. JSX allows you to define your components and reuse them. Oh well, no JSX, but I'll just have to resort to coding React components in Dart (which turns out to be a bit of a mess ...) Now my shiney new Dart app needs to display some huge lists of Data in tables/grids. I could build my own, but surely some smart dev has done this before me! Found Slick Grid, but it's for JS (the Dart port is not as performant). Dart tools mentions that there is a JS Interop 'shortcut': If a JS component has been annotated (Typescript) you can use the annotated files to generate Dart Modules! So I run the tool on the annotated Slick Grid typescript files. Success! It does generate the Dart libs! Ouuups, my boiler plate Dart project does not compile anymore since adding the Slick grid modules. Dig some more, fix the compilation issues (some obscure option was missing when converting from TS to Dart). We're back on track, my project compiles but... no grid ever show up. Looks like it's time to test the debugging features for Dart. I get Dart to generate .map files for my project. This basically allows you to debug Dart code in browser (FF for me), and the debugging begins. I can spot exactly on which line of my Dart code the grid is supposed to be instantiated, but this requires me to move through the Dart to JS interop code and try to understand why there is a JS exception thrown somewhere. So, maybe for some Dart gurus out there this is simple and run of the mill stuff. I would like to hear from you. So far I still don't have any data grids to show my huge data set ... and am still wondering if I'm going to install Typescript which seems more tightly coupled (in a good way) to JS. Calling all Dart gurus, give me your thoughts on this, I want to use Dart and have it succeed. Dart Noob
- shams93 10y agoSoundtrap used dart to build the first webaudio/webmidi DAW in the browser pretty impressive haven't seen anyone build anything that complex without dart.
- shams93 10y agoSoundtrap used dart to build the first webaudio/webmidi DAW in the browser pretty impressive haven't seen anyone build anything that complex without dart.
- markdog12 10y agoDev lead here for a tiny startup. I selected Dart for front and back end, sharing code between them. It has been a great experience and I don't have many complaints. One of the designer's goals was familiarity. I believe they definitely nailed that goal. We've had experienced devs contributing to the codebase in 3 days without ever seeing a line of Dart code before. And they absolutely love working with Dart. Here's some nice features to those who aren't familiar with the language: - Class-based, object-oriented - Static typing - Generics - Async/await that makes your asynchronous code look like synchronous code - (avoids callback hell) - Generators - Future-based, non-blocking APIs - Positional, named, optional parameters with default values - Arrow syntax for brevity - Type inference - Packages facilitate modularity - Named constructors - Functional programming features (map, fold, reduce, where, take, forEach, etc...) - Cascade operator - String interpolation - Implicit interfaces - Mixins (Code re-use without complex inheritance hiearchies) - Reflection - Streams - Operator overloading - Metadata annotations - Concurrency through Isolates - SIMD - Call into JavaScript code and vice/versa - Generate nice documentation with /// dart comments - Built-in testing facilites - pub run test - Open source - Open standard
- christophilus 10y agoI've never even considered Dart. If I'm going to choose a foreign (to me) stack, I'd prefer it was in a functional language. I'm curious to hear a few things from your experience: how fast/slow are the builds? What cons do you have now that you've been using it a while?
- gcp 10y agoHow many of these aren't available in ES2015 or TypeScript?
- isoos 10y agoI have been exposed to TS a bit, so this list may not be exhaustive, but to name a few that I use on a regular basis: - Consistent async API (incl. Future, Streams, async* for Streams, async/await support everywhere). async.js is nowhere near to this. - Type inference and analyzer toolchain that works and don't need to fall back on grep. The moment you start using anything like lodash or similar you will lose your ability to explore the code reliably. - Isolates and Zones as higher-level constructs for dealing with complex concurrency and parallelism constructs. Nothing comparable in the JS world. - Cascade operator. - 1 != "1" (have been burnt by JS several times, and TypeScript won't provide a break from it) I hope to use soon: - SIMD
- bhouston 10y agoHow is fastest growing defined? By percentage? That is easy for niche languages with small markets. By lines of code? That is impressive.
- gefh 10y agohttps://xkcd.com/1102/ https://xkcd.com/1102/
- myth_drannon 10y agoLooking at HN's Who is hiring job posts there is zero interest in it. Typescript , Elm on the other hand are going up. http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2017/january.html?compare1=Dart&compare2=Elm&compare3=ClojureScript&compare4=TypeScript http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2017/... Yeah, you can say HN is startup echo chamber etc.. Well StackOverflow's job board has more mature companies and again zero interest in Dart. Here is the latest scraped data. https://github.com/aparij/soCareers-Data/blob/master/result/tags/tags-jobs2016-12-31.json https://github.com/aparij/soCareers-Data/blob/master/result/...
- Sammi 10y agoThanks for those two links. Great stuff.
- lostmsu 10y agoIf you join my religion, it will be the fastest growing with at least 100% per day!
- ClayFerguson 10y agoThe absolute LAST thing the world needed in 2016 was another programming language. Google did with Dart precisely what Microsoft tried to do when they (MSFT) created a proprietary JavaScript back in 1997(ish). Big tech companies just have a lot of hubris and want to "own" everything they touch. Any large software company, given enough time and success, will eventually create it's own programming language. It's just in their nature. It's the natural progression of market domination. They COULD contribute their efforts to improving EXISTING languages (like MSFT finally did to their credit with TypeScript, building on non-Proprietary JS, which is great) but there is a seemingly irresistible allure to the thought of owning the design and molding a language to perfectly fit your own company's desires. You never have to deal with standards, when you're just making it up as you go along. PLUS the massive benefit of the anti-competitive foot-hold (monopolistic foot-hold) that having its own language gives to a company, is just too tempting. They cannot resist. However most developers are sick of the lanuage-Thrash. 99% of it is not innovative in the slightest, but just somebody reinventing and resolving problems that have already been invented and solved countless times before. I really really hope dart dies (and GO can also go). In my opinion there are three languages that need to still exist: Java, JavaScript/TypesScript, and C++. Those fill EVERY need, and if the innovators would ADD TO THOSE rather than starting from scratch and pushing the reset button the software world would be a MUCH better place, and so would overall software quality.
- benley 10y agoYou are aware that Dart was not released in 2016, yes? The first public release was in 2011. Feel free to stick only to your company's Recommended Best Practices Industry Standard Languages and Libraries. But, there are lots of languages out there, and many of us have good reasons for using them. Deal with it.
- ClayFerguson 10y agoWell if you jump from language to language, you'll never build a strong resume. Keep that in mind. I'm nearly 50yrs old now and have stayed on course with either C++ or Java, and never needed or wanted any of the "Flavor of the Week" crap the script kiddies love piddling in. Personally I think not being able to stick to something is a form of A.D.D. but that's just me. Deal with that. And no I didn't give a shit about nor claim I knew when Dart was invented.
- bitmapbrother 10y agoDart is also a first class language in Google's new OS codenamed Fuchsia.
- the_duke 10y agoI haven't heard about it since the repos went public, do you have any more info?
- thewhitetulip 10y agoOkay so a naive and stupid question, why do I use Dart? what does it replace? does it have any frameworks other than angular? can I use it with Vue.JS (since I have spent considerable time learning Vue) I tried reading their website multiple times, each of the time I was left confused as to where the language fit
- jayflux 10y agoI think the original idea of dart was to replace JavaScript, back when the language looked stale and had no future. Now that the JS community/committee have sorted themselves out and we have ES6 etc, there's not much need for dart now.
- naansensical 10y agoI'm more than a little skeptical of a rating scheme that puts JavaScript use at 2.85% and Assembly Language at 2.7%. Clearly JS programmers outnumber assembly programmers 1000 to 1. http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
- proteinbased 10y agohttps://xkcd.com/1102/ https://xkcd.com/1102/
- shams93 10y agoIf you want to see an amazing demo of what can be done with Dart, look at soundtrap.com, a full DAW running on webaudio/webmidi built with Dart.
- greenspot 10y agoDon't want to be the jerk here. The problem with languages is that it's not enough to be just great, feature-rich or thought-trough. At some point they must create their own ecosystem, the bigger the better. The more open, the better. I see other languages which could create bigger ecosystems in less time and as a result attract more influential contributors than Dart did. Just based on its specs, Dart is a wonderful language but again, this is just one part of the story.
- fsloth 10y agoSo AdWords is implemented on Dart. Well, that certainly moved my understanding of the positioning of the language from the large zoo of obscure experimentations to the rare class of industrial and production ready in a single bang. In the classification of computer languages, this is like a new nova burst in the night sky.
- usernam 10y agoYear after year, I've never found the TIOBE index to reflect what I personally experienced in reality. By far. But I'm not in the US. Can somebody comment about their perception on this index?
- stonemetal 10y agoMostly meaningless garbage. The top of the list kind of follows my general awareness of language popularity, but it goes off the rails pretty quickly. Python above VB and JasvaScript seems off in particular. Below that it just gets wacky, Dart above Objective-C for instance.
- garaetjjte 10y agoDon't use Dart for web applications. It is horrible. Hard to integrate with js libraries, lacking features from js, big fat runtime and buggy. It may be good language as replacement for server side javascript, but definitely not for web apps using dart2js.
- munificent 10y ago> lacking features from js What features do you find lacking?
- garaetjjte 10y agoNot language features, but it lacks some HTML DOM objects. Eg. thead, tfoot constructors, style.setProperty don't work for css variables, etc. Small things, but extremely irritating because it defeats whole purpose of having sane wrapper around DOM API when it needs to be workarounded sometimes anyway. I recently tried to access window content opened by window.open and it was absolute nightmare. It cannot be done purely from Dart and requires JS interop, but what's worse passing browser objects between dart and js is buggy. I haven't found a solution that works both on dart2js and dartium, when it works on dartium it is broken on dart2js and vice versa. And debugging dart2js-generated code is almost impossible, just obfuscated mess.