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As me1000 (Randy Luecke) says Dart is not meant for hello world. If you run this through closure-compiler it's reduced to 2000 lines which is nothing next to Un

by sjs 15y ago

As me1000 (Randy Luecke) says Dart is not meant for hello world. If you run this through closure-compiler it's reduced to 2000 lines which is nothing next to Underscore, jQuery, Dojo, etc. We all know the benefits of offloading code to a well known and well tested library or framework, especially if you're writing an app that is thousands of lines anyway. How is this contentious at the end of 2011 unless you're just hating Dart for the sake of it? I haven't looked into the language yet and unless you haven't either let's all refrain from judgements based on this silly metric alone. Circle jerks and knee-jerk reactions are for Reddit, not HN. Don't get me started on the whining about math performance. Reminds me of dinosaurs whining about how assembly is better than C is better than Java is better than.... There is more to software development than math. Crazy, new fangled, inefficient languages eat the lunch of older languages every single time. You have to be insane to pull out that gem. If math is your bottleneck then don't use Dart, if you know that math is your bottleneck then you shouldn't have to be told this! Sorry for the rant but half of the complaints I've read about Dart are utterly ridiculous, and speculative to boot.

chrisohara 15y ago
..and here's the jsperf for the --optimize'd hello world vs. vanilla JS - http://jsperf.com/dart-hello-world-test-with-optimize/2 http://jsperf.com/dart-hello-world-test-with-optimize/2. 17k vs. 4M for me
- sjs 15y ago
  Got any useful benchmarks? Nobody is wondering which language to write their next "hello world" app in. Just for the record I'm not saying Dart is amazing and everyone should use it, all I'm saying is that we should evaluate it objectively. If raw speed is your bottleneck then why are you wasting time evaluating Dart? Nobody is forcing anyone to use it, you can ignore it and move on with your day.
  - chrisohara 15y ago
    Dart won't be supported ubiquitously any time soon (if ever) which is why there'll always be a Dart->JS compiler. Why not just stick with vanilla JS or Harmony/ES6? I'd benchmark some bigger apps but they don't exist yet
- swannodette 15y ago
  ...and your benchmark makes no sense. You're creating the entire Dart environment every time.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
    - swannodette 15y ago
      Which is a one time cost - and roughly the same you pay for including any other framework out there.
      - chrisohara 15y ago
        Same results: http://jsperf.com/dart-hello-world-test-with-optimize/2 http://jsperf.com/dart-hello-world-test-with-optimize/2
        cdata 15y ago
        Let's be realistic with ourselves here: is all that overhead ever going to compete with ten lines of "low level" (ha..) JavaScript? No. The problem here, and what is making us chuckle so much, is that the project as presented to us is not magical. For whatever reason, some of the brightest minds in our industry have not presented us (at this time) with a cross-compiler that is both robust enough to support large apps, and intelligent enough to self-optimize its output. Were we expecting a JavaScript killer from Google? Some of us were, with cynical apprehension. Did this release of the project live up to that expectation? Nope. Could others have done a better job? Maybe, maybe not. Could this project improve over time? Certainly. Will Dart become a JavaScript killer without more magic in its cross-compiler? Personally, I doubt it. Tooling may matter for developing large web apps, but performance matters in those large web apps too; running this test in my iPhone's browser leaves me feeling meh.
        bane 15y ago
        It is improbably in my mind that we've reached an age where javascript is considered low level -- even tongue in cheek. I wonder where this is on the path to the singularity?
masklinn 15y ago
> If you run this through closure-compiler it's reduced to 2000 lines which is nothing next to Underscore [...] Underscore is under 1000 lines unminified and with all comments.
akrymski 15y ago
In general I do agree with you, but there's also some truth to the argument that statically linking only the required dependencies is better than embedding a VM. In a way, this is the difference between CoffeeScript and Dart for client side programming. Sure when your app is really large you'll probably end up with the same thing, but for smaller apps "compiling" should mean "including only the necessary stuff" which CoffeeScript successfully does. I do have an issue with this trend of building VMs on top of VMs, abstracting further and further away to the point where we're using 1000 times more CPU cycles than in the 80s to run the same Pacman in the web browser. I'm for translation rather than virtualization I guess.
tripzilch 15y ago
> If you run this through closure-compiler it's reduced to 2000 lines > which is nothing next to Underscore, jQuery, Dojo, etc. jQuery is 9000 lines, uncompressed with all the comments. I call that about the same order of magnitude as the things you mention, hardly "next to nothing". Additionally, just about every line in jQuery is actually useful for something, even the optimized code seems to mostly consist of a whole load of getters and setters and definitions of what addition and multiplication does. > I haven't looked into the language yet and unless you haven't either let's all refrain from judgements based on this silly metric alone. Lines of code stops being a "silly metric" when the numbers get really big, as they do here. > Don't get me started on the whining about math performance. Reminds me of dinosaurs whining about how assembly is better than C is better than Java is better than.... There is more to software development than math. Surely you didn't mean "There is more to software development than performance." :-) Easy to pick off "math". But is this stuff not supposed to run in a browser? I'll reconsider when I see a simple application running smoothly on a cheap 3 year old desktop PC. No, a Hello World program that compiles to 170kloc is what is ridiculous. That you can optimize it to 2kloc is nice, but it's still just a Hello World program. And a more serious program, how big would that be?
- alttag 15y ago
  > "There is more to software development than performance." On the other hand, development is all about performance. It's just a matter of what we mean by "performance". Time to run? Time to develop? Adoption rate? Income generated? Fame? Software is always about doing something better. The controversy comes when we try to evaluate "better."
tripzilch 15y ago
> Circle jerks and knee-jerk reactions are for Reddit, not HN. > Don't get me started on the whining What is it with all the hostility from the people defending Dart? How about you display some of this expected HN behaviour yourself?
bonch 15y ago
> Don't get me started on the whining about math performance. Reminds me of dinosaurs whining about how assembly is better than C is better than Java is better than.... There is more to software development than math. With the halt in processor speed increases and the move to mobile devices, performance and efficiency have become important again, actually.

by sjs 15y ago

chrisohara 15y ago

..and here's the jsperf for the --optimize'd hello world vs. vanilla JS - http://jsperf.com/dart-hello-world-test-with-optimize/2 http://jsperf.com/dart-hello-world-test-with-optimize/2. 17k vs. 4M for me

sjs 15y ago
Got any useful benchmarks? Nobody is wondering which language to write their next "hello world" app in. Just for the record I'm not saying Dart is amazing and everyone should use it, all I'm saying is that we should evaluate it objectively. If raw speed is your bottleneck then why are you wasting time evaluating Dart? Nobody is forcing anyone to use it, you can ignore it and move on with your day.
- chrisohara 15y ago
  Dart won't be supported ubiquitously any time soon (if ever) which is why there'll always be a Dart->JS compiler. Why not just stick with vanilla JS or Harmony/ES6? I'd benchmark some bigger apps but they don't exist yet
swannodette 15y ago
...and your benchmark makes no sense. You're creating the entire Dart environment every time.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - swannodette 15y ago
    Which is a one time cost - and roughly the same you pay for including any other framework out there.
    - chrisohara 15y ago
      Same results: http://jsperf.com/dart-hello-world-test-with-optimize/2 http://jsperf.com/dart-hello-world-test-with-optimize/2
      - cdata 15y ago
        Let's be realistic with ourselves here: is all that overhead ever going to compete with ten lines of "low level" (ha..) JavaScript? No. The problem here, and what is making us chuckle so much, is that the project as presented to us is not magical. For whatever reason, some of the brightest minds in our industry have not presented us (at this time) with a cross-compiler that is both robust enough to support large apps, and intelligent enough to self-optimize its output. Were we expecting a JavaScript killer from Google? Some of us were, with cynical apprehension. Did this release of the project live up to that expectation? Nope. Could others have done a better job? Maybe, maybe not. Could this project improve over time? Certainly. Will Dart become a JavaScript killer without more magic in its cross-compiler? Personally, I doubt it. Tooling may matter for developing large web apps, but performance matters in those large web apps too; running this test in my iPhone's browser leaves me feeling meh.
        bane 15y ago
        It is improbably in my mind that we've reached an age where javascript is considered low level -- even tongue in cheek. I wonder where this is on the path to the singularity?

masklinn 15y ago

> If you run this through closure-compiler it's reduced to 2000 lines which is nothing next to Underscore [...] Underscore is under 1000 lines unminified and with all comments.

akrymski 15y ago

In general I do agree with you, but there's also some truth to the argument that statically linking only the required dependencies is better than embedding a VM. In a way, this is the difference between CoffeeScript and Dart for client side programming. Sure when your app is really large you'll probably end up with the same thing, but for smaller apps "compiling" should mean "including only the necessary stuff" which CoffeeScript successfully does. I do have an issue with this trend of building VMs on top of VMs, abstracting further and further away to the point where we're using 1000 times more CPU cycles than in the 80s to run the same Pacman in the web browser. I'm for translation rather than virtualization I guess.

tripzilch 15y ago

> If you run this through closure-compiler it's reduced to 2000 lines > which is nothing next to Underscore, jQuery, Dojo, etc. jQuery is 9000 lines, uncompressed with all the comments. I call that about the same order of magnitude as the things you mention, hardly "next to nothing". Additionally, just about every line in jQuery is actually useful for something, even the optimized code seems to mostly consist of a whole load of getters and setters and definitions of what addition and multiplication does. > I haven't looked into the language yet and unless you haven't either let's all refrain from judgements based on this silly metric alone. Lines of code stops being a "silly metric" when the numbers get really big, as they do here. > Don't get me started on the whining about math performance. Reminds me of dinosaurs whining about how assembly is better than C is better than Java is better than.... There is more to software development than math. Surely you didn't mean "There is more to software development than performance." :-) Easy to pick off "math". But is this stuff not supposed to run in a browser? I'll reconsider when I see a simple application running smoothly on a cheap 3 year old desktop PC. No, a Hello World program that compiles to 170kloc is what is ridiculous. That you can optimize it to 2kloc is nice, but it's still just a Hello World program. And a more serious program, how big would that be?

alttag 15y ago
> "There is more to software development than performance." On the other hand, development is all about performance. It's just a matter of what we mean by "performance". Time to run? Time to develop? Adoption rate? Income generated? Fame? Software is always about doing something better. The controversy comes when we try to evaluate "better."

tripzilch 15y ago

> Circle jerks and knee-jerk reactions are for Reddit, not HN. > Don't get me started on the whining What is it with all the hostility from the people defending Dart? How about you display some of this expected HN behaviour yourself?

bonch 15y ago

> Don't get me started on the whining about math performance. Reminds me of dinosaurs whining about how assembly is better than C is better than Java is better than.... There is more to software development than math. With the halt in processor speed increases and the move to mobile devices, performance and efficiency have become important again, actually.