5 ms·

Dart actually has a lot of characteristics that make it appealing for a lot of the areas I'd have (begrudgingly) used Go - command-line tools or local utilities

Dart actually has a lot of characteristics that make it appealing for a lot of the areas I'd have (begrudgingly) used Go - command-line tools or local utilities. It "can" be scripted, but also AOT compiles, has a saneish type system with generics, and doesn't have pointers to deal with. It's hard for me to want to use it on the web, but I keep watching it and wishing good things for it.

vetinari 6y ago
> command-line tools or local utilities. FFI is quite a PITA, though. Soomer or later you will have to interface some platform libraries, and Dart doesn't make that easy.
- jamil7 6y ago
  > FFI is quite a PITA This is what made me nope out of it last time I experimented with a Flutter module in my app. I'm still watching it closely though as it could be a great fit for other projects.
  - kjksf 6y ago
    This might be outdated opinion (hard to tell without OP explaining what he finds "a PITA"). dart:ffi (https://dart.dev/guides/libraries/c-interop https://dart.dev/guides/libraries/c-interop) is a recent addition to Dart and from where I stand it's a decent FFI system. Maybe not as good as PInvoke in C# or ffi in luajit but better than, say, jni in Java (and any other FFI system that requires you to write glue code in C i.e. python, ruby, nodejs).
    - malkia 6y ago
      good thing to have in an FFI system is ability from one language to call another from callback, and back and forth (if it need to). I believe Dart allows for that. That to be said, stack walking is going to be painful to decode (probably), best I've seen is C#/C++ on Windows - where it flows naturally from one to another.
    - jamil7 6y ago
      Thanks good to know, my experience was most likely outdated as well.
- timsneath 6y ago
  Curious what platforms you're interested in integrating with. We're experimenting here and looking for feedback. As a fun demonstration of the effectiveness of FFI, you can now build Petzold-style native Windows code with Dart: https://github.com/timsneath/win32/blob/master/example/hello.dart https://github.com/timsneath/win32/blob/master/example/hello... And here's a 500-line version of the Kilo console text editor built with Dart: https://github.com/timsneath/dart_console/blob/master/example/kilo.dart https://github.com/timsneath/dart_console/blob/master/exampl... Unlike the original, it runs on both Windows and UNIX-based operating systems.
  - vetinari 6y ago
    I'm actually more interested in Linux side of things. That doesn't prevent me from looking how things are done on Windows, of course. To be fair, last time I looked into dart, the idea of FFI was ports, which was too overcomplicated and undercapable, if you needed something like Gtk or Vulkan. Looking into it now, I see the dart:ffi package is shaping up nicely, so I will have another look at dart again.
  - malkia 6y ago
    Tim, it should be possible that the main .exe (or binary on linux/osx) to export functions, and they can be found back through the flutter_engine.dll/.so, right? (At least on windows it's possible for the exe to __declspec(dllexport) things, not sure on Linux). But even if not, if there is a way to (given might be slow and tedious) to compile what would've been flutter_engine.dll statically linked to your main (host) app, and maybe somewhat hinting here is how to find the "GetProcAddr/dlsym/etc." functions - if one is to look for them. Further on, the generated from dart .so file can be embded (as resource? or slapped at the end of the binary/.exe?) + slapping all other resource - resulting in single app :) I know it's possible, just not so easy to support it (I guess). It's similar to have java/python can be packed into one executable with all C/C++ ffi functions they call (at cost of some build time and effort to achieve so). Then you'll have killer platform for video conferencing (zoom, bluejeans, etc.), messaging (slack, etc.) - and just single binary to deploy. (Oh, on top of that slap a web server into it, and make it that if called with specific command-line option, now it acts as web-server, and the app is visible through the web).
wstrange 6y ago
Dart produces surprisingly small docker images for server code. I recently created small Cloud Run web service with Dart - the docker image is 5.2MB compressed, 12.9 MB as reported by docker. I'm not even sure Go would do better on image size. Tree shaking does wonders here.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

vetinari 6y ago

> command-line tools or local utilities. FFI is quite a PITA, though. Soomer or later you will have to interface some platform libraries, and Dart doesn't make that easy.

jamil7 6y ago
> FFI is quite a PITA This is what made me nope out of it last time I experimented with a Flutter module in my app. I'm still watching it closely though as it could be a great fit for other projects.
- kjksf 6y ago
  This might be outdated opinion (hard to tell without OP explaining what he finds "a PITA"). dart:ffi (https://dart.dev/guides/libraries/c-interop https://dart.dev/guides/libraries/c-interop) is a recent addition to Dart and from where I stand it's a decent FFI system. Maybe not as good as PInvoke in C# or ffi in luajit but better than, say, jni in Java (and any other FFI system that requires you to write glue code in C i.e. python, ruby, nodejs).
  - malkia 6y ago
    good thing to have in an FFI system is ability from one language to call another from callback, and back and forth (if it need to). I believe Dart allows for that. That to be said, stack walking is going to be painful to decode (probably), best I've seen is C#/C++ on Windows - where it flows naturally from one to another.
  - jamil7 6y ago
    Thanks good to know, my experience was most likely outdated as well.
timsneath 6y ago
Curious what platforms you're interested in integrating with. We're experimenting here and looking for feedback. As a fun demonstration of the effectiveness of FFI, you can now build Petzold-style native Windows code with Dart: https://github.com/timsneath/win32/blob/master/example/hello.dart https://github.com/timsneath/win32/blob/master/example/hello... And here's a 500-line version of the Kilo console text editor built with Dart: https://github.com/timsneath/dart_console/blob/master/example/kilo.dart https://github.com/timsneath/dart_console/blob/master/exampl... Unlike the original, it runs on both Windows and UNIX-based operating systems.
- vetinari 6y ago
  I'm actually more interested in Linux side of things. That doesn't prevent me from looking how things are done on Windows, of course. To be fair, last time I looked into dart, the idea of FFI was ports, which was too overcomplicated and undercapable, if you needed something like Gtk or Vulkan. Looking into it now, I see the dart:ffi package is shaping up nicely, so I will have another look at dart again.
- malkia 6y ago
  Tim, it should be possible that the main .exe (or binary on linux/osx) to export functions, and they can be found back through the flutter_engine.dll/.so, right? (At least on windows it's possible for the exe to __declspec(dllexport) things, not sure on Linux). But even if not, if there is a way to (given might be slow and tedious) to compile what would've been flutter_engine.dll statically linked to your main (host) app, and maybe somewhat hinting here is how to find the "GetProcAddr/dlsym/etc." functions - if one is to look for them. Further on, the generated from dart .so file can be embded (as resource? or slapped at the end of the binary/.exe?) + slapping all other resource - resulting in single app :) I know it's possible, just not so easy to support it (I guess). It's similar to have java/python can be packed into one executable with all C/C++ ffi functions they call (at cost of some build time and effort to achieve so). Then you'll have killer platform for video conferencing (zoom, bluejeans, etc.), messaging (slack, etc.) - and just single binary to deploy. (Oh, on top of that slap a web server into it, and make it that if called with specific command-line option, now it acts as web-server, and the app is visible through the web).

wstrange 6y ago

Dart produces surprisingly small docker images for server code. I recently created small Cloud Run web service with Dart - the docker image is 5.2MB compressed, 12.9 MB as reported by docker. I'm not even sure Go would do better on image size. Tree shaking does wonders here.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]