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This video (https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/324431687 https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/324431687) is from the V8 guys. Its main

This video (https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/324431687 https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/324431687) is from the V8 guys. Its mainly about V8 and the massive complexity of their codebase because of all the tricks they have to do to work around the problems with making js performant (even if its still unpredictable and memory intensive). At the end they cover a bit about the dart vm. For anyone who has worked on a large codebase with a fundamentally unsound architecture or inconsistent requirements you can feel their pain and understand their motiviation in making dart. Basically they are trying to show that if they just change the architecture of js a little bit to make dart then they can get twice (currently) the performance and a lot less complexity. They knew they could do this because they used to work on smalltalk vms. (I think that in another way dart is actually an algol-like trojan horse for the invasion of smalltalk because there's a load of ex-smalltalkers on the team and you can never cure those guys). What's a little tragic about it is that they can't figure out why people aren't jumping all over dart (yet). The tragedy lies in the fact that they are partly responsible for it by hiding just how bad js is in terms of performance through their heroic efforts on V8. Then again the video is titled "Web Languages and VMs: Fast Code is Always in Fashion". The last word in the title shows that they probably do have their suspicions as to why people aren't immediately flocking to dart.

Ygg2 13y ago
I won't lie. I'd love for JS currently to be replaced by version 2.0 that starts mostly fresh. Hell, I'd love for AXR to replace current HTML+CSS. However this is impossible, given the way Internet functions (still got those sites from 1995 there, good luck migrating that to JS2). That said Dart isn't that JS2. Perhaps that languages will never exist at all. I assume that what web might need is a VM that can run various languages on. And Javascript as web bytecode just doesn't sound right to me.
- ahoge 13y ago
  > That said Dart isn't that JS2. To me, it is. Dart fixed everything which was wrong with JavaScript. There is proper lexical scoping, a lexically scoped `this`, no type coercion, build-in classes/inheritance, built-in dependency handling, built-in annotations/doc-comments, and good tooling is also possible. It really does scale and it's very nice to work with. Plus, there are a bunch of nice features like lambdas, mixins, and named arguments. > Javascript as web bytecode just doesn't sound right to me. Yea, it's kinda icky, but there doesn't really seem to be a way around it. Fortunately, dart2js' output is reasonable in terms of size and performance. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in IE8.
  - Ygg2 13y ago
    To each his own I guess. I guess for me Dart doesn't capture a lot of JavaScripts good sides I guess (the homoiconity of JSON and JS). Also Google being the main sponsor just makes me slightly wary of it, thought its probably just my own paranoia.
    - ahoge 13y ago
      > the homoiconi[ci]ty of JSON and JS There is a package for making interacting with JSON more seamless and JavaScript-like: http://pub.dartlang.org/packages/json_object http://pub.dartlang.org/packages/json_object > Google being the main sponsor just makes me slightly wary of it In that regard, I clearly prefer Google over Oracle or Microsoft. I was also happy with Sun back in the days.

Ygg2 13y ago

I won't lie. I'd love for JS currently to be replaced by version 2.0 that starts mostly fresh. Hell, I'd love for AXR to replace current HTML+CSS. However this is impossible, given the way Internet functions (still got those sites from 1995 there, good luck migrating that to JS2). That said Dart isn't that JS2. Perhaps that languages will never exist at all. I assume that what web might need is a VM that can run various languages on. And Javascript as web bytecode just doesn't sound right to me.

ahoge 13y ago
> That said Dart isn't that JS2. To me, it is. Dart fixed everything which was wrong with JavaScript. There is proper lexical scoping, a lexically scoped `this`, no type coercion, build-in classes/inheritance, built-in dependency handling, built-in annotations/doc-comments, and good tooling is also possible. It really does scale and it's very nice to work with. Plus, there are a bunch of nice features like lambdas, mixins, and named arguments. > Javascript as web bytecode just doesn't sound right to me. Yea, it's kinda icky, but there doesn't really seem to be a way around it. Fortunately, dart2js' output is reasonable in terms of size and performance. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in IE8.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  To each his own I guess. I guess for me Dart doesn't capture a lot of JavaScripts good sides I guess (the homoiconity of JSON and JS). Also Google being the main sponsor just makes me slightly wary of it, thought its probably just my own paranoia.
  - ahoge 13y ago
    > the homoiconi[ci]ty of JSON and JS There is a package for making interacting with JSON more seamless and JavaScript-like: http://pub.dartlang.org/packages/json_object http://pub.dartlang.org/packages/json_object > Google being the main sponsor just makes me slightly wary of it In that regard, I clearly prefer Google over Oracle or Microsoft. I was also happy with Sun back in the days.