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Dart just seems phenomenally boring. Now, I'm not necessarily against boring. A great synthesis of what we've learned thus far in PL design, breaking no new g

Dart just seems phenomenally boring. Now, I'm not necessarily against boring. A great synthesis of what we've learned thus far in PL design, breaking no new ground, but packaging it together into a nice cohesive whole would be very welcome. But Dart seems like just a minor rearrangement of Java which does little to make Java faster, safer, or more expressive. Why invest in Dart as opposed to Java 8 + GWT, or CoffeeScript for that matter?

spankalee 15y ago
GWT is pretty painful to use compared to Dart in my experience. Where in GWT you have long compiles or a very slow Dev Mode, in Dart you have extremely fast compiles and Dartium which is even faster. GWT's great when you like static typing, Java development tools, and Java libraries (which I do, so I use GWT), but Dart give you static typing if you want, especially with checked mode, and should support similarly awesome tools because of the typing. Libraries will hopefully come along, and quickly I predict because there won't need to be the equivalent of jQuery and all the classical inheritance implementations. If you're coming from GWT, just think of Dart as GWT but fast, designed to compile to JS with a native option, and much lighter-weight syntax and language features than Java.
- quatrevingts 15y ago
  I don't see anything about the language though that would make it significantly faster to compile than Java... it seems to be a matter of development priorities for the implementation teams. (Dev mode can be pretty fast in my experience though, depending on the browser. For some reason there seems to be major performance issues with Chrome but not Firefox.) If the effort that went into building Dartium had simply gone into building a custom VM for GWT, couldn't we have achieved the same thing, but without the fragmentation? Perhaps Oracle's lawsuits are playing a role here.

spankalee 15y ago

GWT is pretty painful to use compared to Dart in my experience. Where in GWT you have long compiles or a very slow Dev Mode, in Dart you have extremely fast compiles and Dartium which is even faster. GWT's great when you like static typing, Java development tools, and Java libraries (which I do, so I use GWT), but Dart give you static typing if you want, especially with checked mode, and should support similarly awesome tools because of the typing. Libraries will hopefully come along, and quickly I predict because there won't need to be the equivalent of jQuery and all the classical inheritance implementations. If you're coming from GWT, just think of Dart as GWT but fast, designed to compile to JS with a native option, and much lighter-weight syntax and language features than Java.

quatrevingts 15y ago
I don't see anything about the language though that would make it significantly faster to compile than Java... it seems to be a matter of development priorities for the implementation teams. (Dev mode can be pretty fast in my experience though, depending on the browser. For some reason there seems to be major performance issues with Chrome but not Firefox.) If the effort that went into building Dartium had simply gone into building a custom VM for GWT, couldn't we have achieved the same thing, but without the fragmentation? Perhaps Oracle's lawsuits are playing a role here.