6 ms·

Dart added support for cross-compilation

70 points by Alifatisk 1y ago

Alifatisk 1y ago
https://github.com/dart-lang/site-www/commit/0789e0957eddcc999b7463e1e51484e09286157d https://github.com/dart-lang/site-www/commit/0789e0957eddcc9...
- cpswan 1y ago
  https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/28617 https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/28617 provides some commentary on where things are, and what might happen next.
radiKal07 1y ago
Dart is such an amazing language. I really wish it gained traction in more industries.
- mdhb 1y ago
  Agreed, one of my pass the time activities during covid was basically just spending the year trying out and evaluating different languages across a whole range of different metrics and features. For me Dart was the clear winner and I’ve never once regretted making it my new default, in fact it’s only increased its gap compared to everything else in the time since then.
- sabellito 1y ago
  Genuine question: what do you think is amazing about the language?
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    Tooling, to start with. First party lsp and plugins for IntelliJ, VSCode, formatter, test, Flutter, etc. It’s like Go meets Java, but in a great way.
    - als0 1y ago
      > It’s like Go meets Java, but in a great way. I am struggling hard to imagine how any greatness could be achieved from that. Can you say a bit more?
      - gbalduzzi 1y ago
        Dart allows you to write compact and clean code, like GO. Dart properly supports classes and is feature-rich, like Java. I think those are the main points for the above comment
        owebmaster 1y ago
        I think we know what made it not popular then
        vhantz 1y ago
        Compact and clean is very far from my experience writing a very simple library management app with flutter. The framework literally gets in the way. You can't do anything without having to deal with some convoluted callback mechanism. You can't manipulate any object without some forced async crap. And it's so verbose. Despite my best efforts to keep things clean and organized, I get lost in the very small codebase after a couple of weeks. It's got to the point where I'm just rewriting it with Qt quick instead. It was my first time touching both flutter and dart, so maybe it's all subjective, but right now I think it's just a badly designed language/framework.
        homebrewer 1y ago
        We must have very different definitions of compact, with Go requiring dozens of lines of boilerplate where other languages make do with one line of '?' or '.filter'.
      - wiseowise 1y ago
        Amazing tooling meets more than okay language.
  - mdhb 1y ago
    Tooling, documentation, language design, balance across a million different competing goals, interoperability, deployability, simplicity, expressivity and much more. It’s just a REALLY REALLY nice modern language with a team of very smart people behind it who very clearly sweat the small details and have a long history of being able to make great decisions along the way even in ambiguous situations where it’s not always clear what the best path is going to be.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- agilob 1y ago
  In two companies we already gave up on Dart and Flutter because of how it's backwards incompatible is. The language and frameworks moves very fast, it develops new tools and classes before the old ones become mature enough and adopted by the industry. Then suddenly, Flutter 27 lands, requires Dart 45, which requires intl 81.2.5. and now you can't compile anything anymore. Whole upgrade process, tools, compiles and libraries are broken for months before Google and OSS catches up. Once ecosystem is on Flutter 27 your upgrade path takes weeks, because a core method was renamed or compiler flag removed and CI/CD is failing. So you just move back to Java and Kotlin, where code from 2012 still compiles and works just fine.
  - mhoad 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - quaintdev 1y ago
      I developed this app few years agon in Flutter. I can't build it anymore. I can fix my own codebase but it shows issues in dependencies https://github.com/quaintdev/anchor https://github.com/quaintdev/anchor
    - hamaluik 1y ago
      I released two apps built in dart on flutter. I loved it at the time, but I ran into this issue headlong with both of them. Release v1.0, move on to other things, come back in a year with a new computer to fix a minor bug and I can’t even compile the original release anymore, and had to spend forever rejiggering everything to get it back to the state it was when I left it. I really loved dart, and even flutter, building in it was a breeze. But the churn made the js ecosystem look slow.
    - justin66 1y ago
      You don't get to very rudely accuse someone of giving "fake examples" (why?) and then, later, use weasel words like "in my experience." Perhaps your experience isn't representative of everyone else's.
nerder92 1y ago
Dart is one of the most underrated language out there. Paradoxically is alive thanks to Flutter, but is also not as popular due to Flutter.
gitroom 1y ago
dart's always been solid for me but barely see it in big companies tbh - something stopping adoption or is it just stuck in its lane?
- mdhb 1y ago
  It’s only maybe for the past two years now that it’s even been promoted as a general purpose language, which I think was a huge oversight on the Dart team’s behalf. For a long time they would just promote it as a great way to build UIs. What ever drove them to talk about it like that originally is beyond me.
- neonsunset 1y ago
  The competition is too strong. At a team or organization level, where neither uses Flutter, why would you use Dart when C# and Kotlin exist? Both have better performance, better UX for doing common application tasks and vastly bigger ecosystems.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Additionally, none of them are tied to a UI framework as survival, had it not been for Flutter and Dart would be long gone.
  - robertlagrant 1y ago
    I think the idea was you can make a UI using one codebase for iOS and Android.
bergwerf 1y ago
I feel like at this point Dart suffers from being a Google project: Google decides its fate, and Google has built a rather poor reputation when it comes to stability. I don't have concrete evidence, but I think the Google culture adheres more to the rolling release and move fast and break things ideology. I personally witnessed several of my own Dart projects needing serious refactoring after just a few years. Also, I feel like Dart is a maximalist project. "Batteries included" also means a whole myriad of tools and libraries also at the grace of the Google Dart team.
- akmittal 1y ago
  Go is doing exceptionally well while being a Google project. I don't think its a Google problem. IMO Dart has become a niche Flutter language instead of a general-purpose language. Dart decided to focus on being a client-side language and it is very difficult to win over JS/TS.
  - porridgeraisin 1y ago
    I think that's because it's of use to google internally. Dart and lit probably don't find as much use.
  - psychoslave 1y ago
    Go had the name of its authors to weight in. While I'm not of the type to give high weight in term of technical assessment. And I don't even mean C is praisable in term of influence it had on the industry. But without a doubt it did impact it deeply over a very long span of time. And at larger scale many people do love to follow their unquestionable prophets.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Being at Google helped, not that Alef, Limbo, Newsqueak and Oberon-2 were that huge commercial successes, and there is also the question how much influence would have C had in the industry if AT&T would be selling it from the get go, instead of the way UNIX and C were freely distributed across universities. Many times it isn't the quality of the programming language alone, rather external factors that trigger its adoption.
jurmous 1y ago
I prefer the Kotlin route. It is also supported by a foundation of multiple companies which includes Google and Kotlin is the native language for Android. It supports more targets already for years with Kotlin Native. And recently the Compose iOS target became stable with 1.8 enabling cross platform UI development. It is easier to integrate with native components. https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/05/compose-multiplatform-1-8-0-released-compose-multiplatform-for-ios-is-stable-and-production-ready/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/05/compose-multiplatf... Also the web stack (incl Wasm) got some big updates. https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/05/present-and-future-kotlin-for-web/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/05/present-and-future... Why would Google still invest in Flutter and Dart when Kotlin is becoming this versatile? Are there long term advantages with Dart which I am missing?
- zt64 1y ago
  I also agree, supporting both tools seems unnecessary. In my experiences Kotlin multiplatform and compose multiplatform is vastly more enjoyable to write instead of Dart. The development environment alone has also been much easier to get started with using Kotlin multiplatform.
- lawgimenez 1y ago
  With Android’s frequent releases starting this year, I doubt Flutter can keep up. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/10/android-sdk-release-update.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/10/android-sd...
  - mdhb 1y ago
    Flutter have been doing quarterly releases for years I think they are going to be fine, I don’t think Android doing 2 releases in a year is going to present any kind of problems whatsoever for them.
- jillesvangurp 1y ago
  Dart/flutter of course predates a lot of this stuff. But the point is that Kotlin and Kotlin multiplatform are things that happened to Google that they ended up endorsing and embracing (to their credit). When they were digging in with the Oracle lawsuit, their Android Java support fell behind a bit. And then Kotlin showed up as a drop in replacement and quickly became the default for a lot of Android development. It was so obviously nicer than Java 1.6 that many Android developers didn't bother waiting for kotlin 1.0 to be released even. Java support was eventually upgraded for Android but that took a while. Google made endorsing Kotlin official many years ago. Kotlin is now the preferred language for Android development. And while Java is still supported, using it is probably a mistake for new applications as Java API support increasingly an afterthought in both Android SDKs and the wider library ecosystem. Google also pushed Flutter as a completely new way of doing UI and targeted it at a completely new OS (Fuchsia) that would replace Android. That never happened and Fuchsia is basically still around on life support but otherwise not going anywhere. Meanwhile, Flutter seems well liked by some but it's also a bit a weird techstack with its own language and compiler and fairly limited integration options. In short that whole techstack seems increasingly a bit of a dead end. And crucially, Google has always pushed back on the notion of building any support for Kotlin around flutter, which was an obvious thing to start doing years ago. There are some weak arguments about native compilation here. But Java/kotlin were always compiled ahead of time on Android. So, I expect that the dominant arguments here were non technical and boil down to not invented here syndrome. And now kotlin multiplatform (endorsed last year by Google) and compose multi platform are there. Compose multiplatform is interesting because it extends Google's own framework to other platforms (IOS, Web, Desktop). That has been an obvious thing to work on for a while but Google didn't want to go there because it had Flutter. But now Jetbrains has done it for them. The multiplatform support on IOS is getting quite nice. Native compilation, easy bindings between kotlin and swift code (both ways), etc. It will be interesting to see if Google rallies behind compose multiplatform as well. IMHO they should and it's an opportunity to get a bit of control over IOS development and wrestle that away from Apple.
finnjohnsen2 1y ago
Dart is easy to learn. If you've been around a while and know a few c-like; the gotcha hits pretty quickly. Nice tooling, good documentation and generally no surprises good or bad.
Daegalus 1y ago
I love Dart as a language, but there were multiple choices made by Google that kind of ruined it outside of Flutter. First, when it was still a viable Node.js alternative, Google only partially cared about that side. And when they did, they had someone make Shelf, which kind of killed a lot of web framework initiatives (including my own). Instead of building support tools, and fleshing out the stdlib, they were busy making competing libraries. And shelf was miserable to work in, and killed off a lot of desire to work on backend. Second, at some point they just said F U to the backend and focused 100% on frontend, abandoning backend to whatever the current state it is in. I don't think they have improved anything on that front much. Finally, when their gamble on Web/Frontend failed, and aliented all the tool/backend developers, Flutter was the only thing to save it. Dart could have been a great Node.js alternative, but Google was too fixated on web. Typescript ate its lunch, browser devs said no, including Chromium team, and now Deno is a viable alternative to Node.js and Dart backend. I still maintain a couple of my dart libraries, and have been for 12 years now i think (since Dart launched). maybe longer. but I don't do any other active dev in Dart. I just fondly think of what could have been anytime I go into those codebases.
- rafaelmn 1y ago
  Thing is Dart is a shitty language with tradeoffs made specifically to make Flutter work well. The terrible meta programming support shows in basic things such as JSON serialization. It's like Java--, I can't think of a reason to use it on backend over Java or Go. It's not comparable to Javascript - despite it's warts, Javascript is very dynamic and when coupled with typescript that let's you do a lot of powerful things and describe it with the structural type system. I have not used dart for a few years now but I've used it both when it was DartAngular and Dartium, and in flutter 2/3. Don't get me wrong - the DX of writing flutter and fast reload is the best I've used in mobile space, but the language itself is terrible and I would not use it in any other scenario.
  - Daegalus 1y ago
    Fair assessment, I am not quite as polarized, but there is a reason i use Go, Deno, and Typescript myself.
flax 1y ago
I love Dart and Flutter, it's my go-to when starting a new app idea. I want to learn Kotlin, but something about it just keeps me bouncing right off. It's ugly to me. It does not look like a serious language. I know that it IS, but I just hate reading/writing kotlin. Dart fits right into the well-worn grooves in my brain established from decades of Java, AS3, JavaScript and Typescript.

70 points by Alifatisk 1y ago

https://github.com/dart-lang/site-www/commit/0789e0957eddcc999b7463e1e51484e09286157d https://github.com/dart-lang/site-www/commit/0789e0957eddcc9...

cpswan 1y ago
https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/28617 https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/28617 provides some commentary on where things are, and what might happen next.

radiKal07 1y ago

Dart is such an amazing language. I really wish it gained traction in more industries.

mdhb 1y ago
Agreed, one of my pass the time activities during covid was basically just spending the year trying out and evaluating different languages across a whole range of different metrics and features. For me Dart was the clear winner and I’ve never once regretted making it my new default, in fact it’s only increased its gap compared to everything else in the time since then.
sabellito 1y ago
Genuine question: what do you think is amazing about the language?
- wiseowise 1y ago
  Tooling, to start with. First party lsp and plugins for IntelliJ, VSCode, formatter, test, Flutter, etc. It’s like Go meets Java, but in a great way.
  - als0 1y ago
    > It’s like Go meets Java, but in a great way. I am struggling hard to imagine how any greatness could be achieved from that. Can you say a bit more?
    - gbalduzzi 1y ago
      Dart allows you to write compact and clean code, like GO. Dart properly supports classes and is feature-rich, like Java. I think those are the main points for the above comment
      - owebmaster 1y ago
        I think we know what made it not popular then
      - vhantz 1y ago
        Compact and clean is very far from my experience writing a very simple library management app with flutter. The framework literally gets in the way. You can't do anything without having to deal with some convoluted callback mechanism. You can't manipulate any object without some forced async crap. And it's so verbose. Despite my best efforts to keep things clean and organized, I get lost in the very small codebase after a couple of weeks. It's got to the point where I'm just rewriting it with Qt quick instead. It was my first time touching both flutter and dart, so maybe it's all subjective, but right now I think it's just a badly designed language/framework.
      - homebrewer 1y ago
        We must have very different definitions of compact, with Go requiring dozens of lines of boilerplate where other languages make do with one line of '?' or '.filter'.
    - wiseowise 1y ago
      Amazing tooling meets more than okay language.
- mdhb 1y ago
  Tooling, documentation, language design, balance across a million different competing goals, interoperability, deployability, simplicity, expressivity and much more. It’s just a REALLY REALLY nice modern language with a team of very smart people behind it who very clearly sweat the small details and have a long history of being able to make great decisions along the way even in ambiguous situations where it’s not always clear what the best path is going to be.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
agilob 1y ago
In two companies we already gave up on Dart and Flutter because of how it's backwards incompatible is. The language and frameworks moves very fast, it develops new tools and classes before the old ones become mature enough and adopted by the industry. Then suddenly, Flutter 27 lands, requires Dart 45, which requires intl 81.2.5. and now you can't compile anything anymore. Whole upgrade process, tools, compiles and libraries are broken for months before Google and OSS catches up. Once ecosystem is on Flutter 27 your upgrade path takes weeks, because a core method was renamed or compiler flag removed and CI/CD is failing. So you just move back to Java and Kotlin, where code from 2012 still compiles and works just fine.
- mhoad 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - quaintdev 1y ago
    I developed this app few years agon in Flutter. I can't build it anymore. I can fix my own codebase but it shows issues in dependencies https://github.com/quaintdev/anchor https://github.com/quaintdev/anchor
  - hamaluik 1y ago
    I released two apps built in dart on flutter. I loved it at the time, but I ran into this issue headlong with both of them. Release v1.0, move on to other things, come back in a year with a new computer to fix a minor bug and I can’t even compile the original release anymore, and had to spend forever rejiggering everything to get it back to the state it was when I left it. I really loved dart, and even flutter, building in it was a breeze. But the churn made the js ecosystem look slow.
  - justin66 1y ago
    You don't get to very rudely accuse someone of giving "fake examples" (why?) and then, later, use weasel words like "in my experience." Perhaps your experience isn't representative of everyone else's.

nerder92 1y ago

Dart is one of the most underrated language out there. Paradoxically is alive thanks to Flutter, but is also not as popular due to Flutter.

gitroom 1y ago

dart's always been solid for me but barely see it in big companies tbh - something stopping adoption or is it just stuck in its lane?

mdhb 1y ago
It’s only maybe for the past two years now that it’s even been promoted as a general purpose language, which I think was a huge oversight on the Dart team’s behalf. For a long time they would just promote it as a great way to build UIs. What ever drove them to talk about it like that originally is beyond me.
neonsunset 1y ago
The competition is too strong. At a team or organization level, where neither uses Flutter, why would you use Dart when C# and Kotlin exist? Both have better performance, better UX for doing common application tasks and vastly bigger ecosystems.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Additionally, none of them are tied to a UI framework as survival, had it not been for Flutter and Dart would be long gone.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  I think the idea was you can make a UI using one codebase for iOS and Android.

bergwerf 1y ago

I feel like at this point Dart suffers from being a Google project: Google decides its fate, and Google has built a rather poor reputation when it comes to stability. I don't have concrete evidence, but I think the Google culture adheres more to the rolling release and move fast and break things ideology. I personally witnessed several of my own Dart projects needing serious refactoring after just a few years. Also, I feel like Dart is a maximalist project. "Batteries included" also means a whole myriad of tools and libraries also at the grace of the Google Dart team.

akmittal 1y ago
Go is doing exceptionally well while being a Google project. I don't think its a Google problem. IMO Dart has become a niche Flutter language instead of a general-purpose language. Dart decided to focus on being a client-side language and it is very difficult to win over JS/TS.
- porridgeraisin 1y ago
  I think that's because it's of use to google internally. Dart and lit probably don't find as much use.
- psychoslave 1y ago
  Go had the name of its authors to weight in. While I'm not of the type to give high weight in term of technical assessment. And I don't even mean C is praisable in term of influence it had on the industry. But without a doubt it did impact it deeply over a very long span of time. And at larger scale many people do love to follow their unquestionable prophets.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Being at Google helped, not that Alef, Limbo, Newsqueak and Oberon-2 were that huge commercial successes, and there is also the question how much influence would have C had in the industry if AT&T would be selling it from the get go, instead of the way UNIX and C were freely distributed across universities. Many times it isn't the quality of the programming language alone, rather external factors that trigger its adoption.

jurmous 1y ago

I prefer the Kotlin route. It is also supported by a foundation of multiple companies which includes Google and Kotlin is the native language for Android. It supports more targets already for years with Kotlin Native. And recently the Compose iOS target became stable with 1.8 enabling cross platform UI development. It is easier to integrate with native components. https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/05/compose-multiplatform-1-8-0-released-compose-multiplatform-for-ios-is-stable-and-production-ready/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/05/compose-multiplatf... Also the web stack (incl Wasm) got some big updates. https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/05/present-and-future-kotlin-for-web/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/05/present-and-future... Why would Google still invest in Flutter and Dart when Kotlin is becoming this versatile? Are there long term advantages with Dart which I am missing?

zt64 1y ago
I also agree, supporting both tools seems unnecessary. In my experiences Kotlin multiplatform and compose multiplatform is vastly more enjoyable to write instead of Dart. The development environment alone has also been much easier to get started with using Kotlin multiplatform.
lawgimenez 1y ago
With Android’s frequent releases starting this year, I doubt Flutter can keep up. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/10/android-sdk-release-update.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/10/android-sd...
- mdhb 1y ago
  Flutter have been doing quarterly releases for years I think they are going to be fine, I don’t think Android doing 2 releases in a year is going to present any kind of problems whatsoever for them.
jillesvangurp 1y ago
Dart/flutter of course predates a lot of this stuff. But the point is that Kotlin and Kotlin multiplatform are things that happened to Google that they ended up endorsing and embracing (to their credit). When they were digging in with the Oracle lawsuit, their Android Java support fell behind a bit. And then Kotlin showed up as a drop in replacement and quickly became the default for a lot of Android development. It was so obviously nicer than Java 1.6 that many Android developers didn't bother waiting for kotlin 1.0 to be released even. Java support was eventually upgraded for Android but that took a while. Google made endorsing Kotlin official many years ago. Kotlin is now the preferred language for Android development. And while Java is still supported, using it is probably a mistake for new applications as Java API support increasingly an afterthought in both Android SDKs and the wider library ecosystem. Google also pushed Flutter as a completely new way of doing UI and targeted it at a completely new OS (Fuchsia) that would replace Android. That never happened and Fuchsia is basically still around on life support but otherwise not going anywhere. Meanwhile, Flutter seems well liked by some but it's also a bit a weird techstack with its own language and compiler and fairly limited integration options. In short that whole techstack seems increasingly a bit of a dead end. And crucially, Google has always pushed back on the notion of building any support for Kotlin around flutter, which was an obvious thing to start doing years ago. There are some weak arguments about native compilation here. But Java/kotlin were always compiled ahead of time on Android. So, I expect that the dominant arguments here were non technical and boil down to not invented here syndrome. And now kotlin multiplatform (endorsed last year by Google) and compose multi platform are there. Compose multiplatform is interesting because it extends Google's own framework to other platforms (IOS, Web, Desktop). That has been an obvious thing to work on for a while but Google didn't want to go there because it had Flutter. But now Jetbrains has done it for them. The multiplatform support on IOS is getting quite nice. Native compilation, easy bindings between kotlin and swift code (both ways), etc. It will be interesting to see if Google rallies behind compose multiplatform as well. IMHO they should and it's an opportunity to get a bit of control over IOS development and wrestle that away from Apple.

finnjohnsen2 1y ago

Dart is easy to learn. If you've been around a while and know a few c-like; the gotcha hits pretty quickly. Nice tooling, good documentation and generally no surprises good or bad.

Daegalus 1y ago

I love Dart as a language, but there were multiple choices made by Google that kind of ruined it outside of Flutter. First, when it was still a viable Node.js alternative, Google only partially cared about that side. And when they did, they had someone make Shelf, which kind of killed a lot of web framework initiatives (including my own). Instead of building support tools, and fleshing out the stdlib, they were busy making competing libraries. And shelf was miserable to work in, and killed off a lot of desire to work on backend. Second, at some point they just said F U to the backend and focused 100% on frontend, abandoning backend to whatever the current state it is in. I don't think they have improved anything on that front much. Finally, when their gamble on Web/Frontend failed, and aliented all the tool/backend developers, Flutter was the only thing to save it. Dart could have been a great Node.js alternative, but Google was too fixated on web. Typescript ate its lunch, browser devs said no, including Chromium team, and now Deno is a viable alternative to Node.js and Dart backend. I still maintain a couple of my dart libraries, and have been for 12 years now i think (since Dart launched). maybe longer. but I don't do any other active dev in Dart. I just fondly think of what could have been anytime I go into those codebases.

rafaelmn 1y ago
Thing is Dart is a shitty language with tradeoffs made specifically to make Flutter work well. The terrible meta programming support shows in basic things such as JSON serialization. It's like Java--, I can't think of a reason to use it on backend over Java or Go. It's not comparable to Javascript - despite it's warts, Javascript is very dynamic and when coupled with typescript that let's you do a lot of powerful things and describe it with the structural type system. I have not used dart for a few years now but I've used it both when it was DartAngular and Dartium, and in flutter 2/3. Don't get me wrong - the DX of writing flutter and fast reload is the best I've used in mobile space, but the language itself is terrible and I would not use it in any other scenario.
- Daegalus 1y ago
  Fair assessment, I am not quite as polarized, but there is a reason i use Go, Deno, and Typescript myself.

flax 1y ago

I love Dart and Flutter, it's my go-to when starting a new app idea. I want to learn Kotlin, but something about it just keeps me bouncing right off. It's ugly to me. It does not look like a serious language. I know that it IS, but I just hate reading/writing kotlin. Dart fits right into the well-worn grooves in my brain established from decades of Java, AS3, JavaScript and Typescript.