7 ms·

And 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 Goo

And 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 ago
Absolutely. Reading HN is not a barometer for the real world.
unknownsavage 10y ago
Yeah, 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 ago
  I 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.
  - guscost 10y ago
    If this turns out like you say, it's interesting that both TypeScript and WebAssembly grew out of efforts to extend King JavaScript while not rocking the boat enough to scare away developers.
    - rch 10y ago
      I think WASM rocks the boat quite a bit, in a good way.
- isoos 10y ago
  Apparently 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.
  - mst 10y ago
    Equally possible: the user was posting so many dart articles it was crowding out higher quality non dart stuff from the 'new' queue. Assuming the moderation action was due to "not liking dart" when we've nothing except the complaining of the newly-banned to substantiate it doesn't strike me as particularly fair.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - shadowmint 10y ago
    I think that's a bit conspiratoralist. If dart was popular you'd see the flag being flown in multiple places; you dont. Its not. Even the /r/dart subreddit is dead. It's not because of some conspiracy to bury dart news; people just don't care. Community is important.
    - munificent 10y ago
      > Even the /r/dart subreddit is dead. /r/dartlang is the main Dart subreddit.
isoos 10y ago
In Hungary I know about a few teams that are developing in Dart both server- and client side. Mostly under-the-radar because of the nature of their products, but still, choosing Dart over TS, Go, whatever your hype is... (If locals are listening in: we are planning to organize a meetup in Budapest, contact me if interested.)
dragonwriter 10y ago
Maybe not. OTOH, if it continues to grow at Google, that can power development for quite a while and provide plenty of opportunity to hit the key use case that drives outside adoption (e.g., the equivalent of Rails for Ruby.) With web front-end (compile-to-JS), server (DartVM), and early-stage mobile (Flutter) stacks, there's a lot of places that key win could come.
- untoreh 10y ago
  All it needs to gain traction is a popular open source project just like docker and kubernetes did with go
danvasquez29 10y ago
I honestly thought the project was either dead or terminal. I tried to adopt it for a pet project 3 years ago and never followed through, and I haven't heard much about it since. Given that what I liked about it most was types and web components, which are pretty robust now with well established tools (Typescript and React), I wonder what's the real allure in Dart as opposed to those seemingly more popular options?
- laxd 10y ago
  Regarding Typescript vs Dart. For me, the allure in Dart is that it's a very clean and nicely designed language, as opposed to a superset of a horrible one.
  - leftrightupdown 10y ago
    Exactly why we picked out dart for our app
- stupidcar 10y ago
  I believe it has a lot to do with internal Google politics. Back in 2004, Google hired Lars Bak and his team (who had previously created the HotSpot VM for Sun) to create the V8 JS engine for Chrome. Their work was a spectacular success. Overnight, JS became one of the fastest dynamic languages in existence, and this ushered in an arms-race for better JS performance across competing browsers. However, after a few years of wringing ever more speed out of JS, Bak and co. were totally fed up with it. In particular, how its various quirks prevented a lot of the optimisations they wanted to do. Afraid that Bak would quit, and maybe go work for a competitor, Google schemed to keep him. They let him design his own new language (originally called Dash, later Dart) that would be more amenable to optimisation, and planned to ship a separate Dart VM within Chrome. However, these plans got leaked, and caused a bit of a furore back in 2011. The feeling was that Google were attempting something of an Microsoft-style takeover of a big chunk of the web platform. When other browser vendors said they wouldn't ship a Dart VM, they plan was dead, sort of. Google still wanted to keep Bak and his team on-board, so they let them continue working, and they developed a Dart-to-JS compiler so Dart could run on the web without a separate VM. Google's big enough and rich enough that they can afford to run plenty of these strange projects. And if Dart is popular internally, and delivering value, why kill it? It is ironic though that of all the big web platform technology plays that Google have made — GWT, Dart, Polymer — the one that went stratospheric was Angular, a random, minor open-source project without any place in the grand strategy. Incidentally, one side effect of all this was that Chrome's V8 engine lost most of its key developers, and so its progress stalled for quite a while. Eventually Google formed a new team V8, based in Munich, to pick up the ball. That's why there's been so much more progress on stuff like ES6+ features and better JIT compilation in the past year or so.
nostrademons 10y ago
It's a really weird story. stupidcar's post basically describes the early history. It was always kind of an ugly stepchild with the Chrome management when I was at Google - had some incredibly talented engineers working on it, but little executive buy-in. But then sometime while Chrome was ignoring it, some ads engineers (who are also incredibly talented) decided that Dart would be a core language in their new ads platform. Which meant that when the Chrome team decided to kill it, Ads piped up and said "No, you can't do that, it's a key part of our infrastructure, making $75B/year and paying all of your salaries." As a result, the whole Dart team was moved over to Ads, where they continue to improve the language & tooling so that Google can continue to make money. Ironically, this probably means that Dart is right up there behind COBOL, C, C++, and Java in terms of the amount of money it makes for its users, and well ahead of more popular languages like Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Go, Rust, etc.
- morecoffee 10y ago
  How long will it be before Google's Angular becomes popular, and the company decides it isn't economical to have two javascript-ish languages? My money is on Typescript.
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    Google has rarely shied away from having 2 (or 5, or 12) of anything: Angular vs. Polymer. GWT vs. Angular vs. Closure vs. Polymer. YouTube vs. Google Video (the latter was still a thing up through 2011, 5 years after the YouTube acquisition). ChromeOS vs. Android. Google Toolbar vs. Chrome Frame. Chrome vs. Android Browser. GTalk vs. Messenger vs. Hangouts vs. Allo vs. Duo
    - VeejayRampay 10y ago
      Google Toolbar and Google Frame are different projects with different purposes. Same for Angular / Polymer. It seems you added them to your list just so that it would be longer.
    - bostand 10y ago
jasonm23 10y ago
Side note. You may find flutter interesting. https://flutter.io https://flutter.io

And 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 ago

Absolutely. Reading HN is not a barometer for the real world.

unknownsavage 10y ago

Yeah, 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 ago
I 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.
- guscost 10y ago
  If this turns out like you say, it's interesting that both TypeScript and WebAssembly grew out of efforts to extend King JavaScript while not rocking the boat enough to scare away developers.
  - rch 10y ago
    I think WASM rocks the boat quite a bit, in a good way.
isoos 10y ago
Apparently 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.
- mst 10y ago
  Equally possible: the user was posting so many dart articles it was crowding out higher quality non dart stuff from the 'new' queue. Assuming the moderation action was due to "not liking dart" when we've nothing except the complaining of the newly-banned to substantiate it doesn't strike me as particularly fair.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- shadowmint 10y ago
  I think that's a bit conspiratoralist. If dart was popular you'd see the flag being flown in multiple places; you dont. Its not. Even the /r/dart subreddit is dead. It's not because of some conspiracy to bury dart news; people just don't care. Community is important.
  - munificent 10y ago
    > Even the /r/dart subreddit is dead. /r/dartlang is the main Dart subreddit.

isoos 10y ago

In Hungary I know about a few teams that are developing in Dart both server- and client side. Mostly under-the-radar because of the nature of their products, but still, choosing Dart over TS, Go, whatever your hype is... (If locals are listening in: we are planning to organize a meetup in Budapest, contact me if interested.)

dragonwriter 10y ago

Maybe not. OTOH, if it continues to grow at Google, that can power development for quite a while and provide plenty of opportunity to hit the key use case that drives outside adoption (e.g., the equivalent of Rails for Ruby.) With web front-end (compile-to-JS), server (DartVM), and early-stage mobile (Flutter) stacks, there's a lot of places that key win could come.

untoreh 10y ago
All it needs to gain traction is a popular open source project just like docker and kubernetes did with go

danvasquez29 10y ago

I honestly thought the project was either dead or terminal. I tried to adopt it for a pet project 3 years ago and never followed through, and I haven't heard much about it since. Given that what I liked about it most was types and web components, which are pretty robust now with well established tools (Typescript and React), I wonder what's the real allure in Dart as opposed to those seemingly more popular options?

laxd 10y ago
Regarding Typescript vs Dart. For me, the allure in Dart is that it's a very clean and nicely designed language, as opposed to a superset of a horrible one.
- leftrightupdown 10y ago
  Exactly why we picked out dart for our app
stupidcar 10y ago
I believe it has a lot to do with internal Google politics. Back in 2004, Google hired Lars Bak and his team (who had previously created the HotSpot VM for Sun) to create the V8 JS engine for Chrome. Their work was a spectacular success. Overnight, JS became one of the fastest dynamic languages in existence, and this ushered in an arms-race for better JS performance across competing browsers. However, after a few years of wringing ever more speed out of JS, Bak and co. were totally fed up with it. In particular, how its various quirks prevented a lot of the optimisations they wanted to do. Afraid that Bak would quit, and maybe go work for a competitor, Google schemed to keep him. They let him design his own new language (originally called Dash, later Dart) that would be more amenable to optimisation, and planned to ship a separate Dart VM within Chrome. However, these plans got leaked, and caused a bit of a furore back in 2011. The feeling was that Google were attempting something of an Microsoft-style takeover of a big chunk of the web platform. When other browser vendors said they wouldn't ship a Dart VM, they plan was dead, sort of. Google still wanted to keep Bak and his team on-board, so they let them continue working, and they developed a Dart-to-JS compiler so Dart could run on the web without a separate VM. Google's big enough and rich enough that they can afford to run plenty of these strange projects. And if Dart is popular internally, and delivering value, why kill it? It is ironic though that of all the big web platform technology plays that Google have made — GWT, Dart, Polymer — the one that went stratospheric was Angular, a random, minor open-source project without any place in the grand strategy. Incidentally, one side effect of all this was that Chrome's V8 engine lost most of its key developers, and so its progress stalled for quite a while. Eventually Google formed a new team V8, based in Munich, to pick up the ball. That's why there's been so much more progress on stuff like ES6+ features and better JIT compilation in the past year or so.

nostrademons 10y ago

It's a really weird story. stupidcar's post basically describes the early history. It was always kind of an ugly stepchild with the Chrome management when I was at Google - had some incredibly talented engineers working on it, but little executive buy-in. But then sometime while Chrome was ignoring it, some ads engineers (who are also incredibly talented) decided that Dart would be a core language in their new ads platform. Which meant that when the Chrome team decided to kill it, Ads piped up and said "No, you can't do that, it's a key part of our infrastructure, making $75B/year and paying all of your salaries." As a result, the whole Dart team was moved over to Ads, where they continue to improve the language & tooling so that Google can continue to make money. Ironically, this probably means that Dart is right up there behind COBOL, C, C++, and Java in terms of the amount of money it makes for its users, and well ahead of more popular languages like Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Go, Rust, etc.

morecoffee 10y ago
How long will it be before Google's Angular becomes popular, and the company decides it isn't economical to have two javascript-ish languages? My money is on Typescript.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  Google has rarely shied away from having 2 (or 5, or 12) of anything: Angular vs. Polymer. GWT vs. Angular vs. Closure vs. Polymer. YouTube vs. Google Video (the latter was still a thing up through 2011, 5 years after the YouTube acquisition). ChromeOS vs. Android. Google Toolbar vs. Chrome Frame. Chrome vs. Android Browser. GTalk vs. Messenger vs. Hangouts vs. Allo vs. Duo
  - VeejayRampay 10y ago
    Google Toolbar and Google Frame are different projects with different purposes. Same for Angular / Polymer. It seems you added them to your list just so that it would be longer.
  - bostand 10y ago

jasonm23 10y ago

Side note. You may find flutter interesting. https://flutter.io https://flutter.io