4 ms·

The idea of Dart is great - but the 'Google' brand attached to it is very worrying. Dart feels like exactly the type of service that Google will just drop in th

by RyanZAG 13y ago

The idea of Dart is great - but the 'Google' brand attached to it is very worrying. Dart feels like exactly the type of service that Google will just drop in the future if it doesn't get popular quickly enough, and with only Google supporting it, that makes any code written it in a huge risk. Google's track record is the single clear problem facing Dart at present. Personally, I've been holding off on Dart for exactly that reason. I have no idea how Google could get around that - maybe a written promise to provide support for Dart for X years? EDIT: Another similar worry: if Dart really does take off, will Google not just drop support for other browsers besides Chrome from stock Dart?

DonnyV 13y ago
This is exactly why I'm not touching it. At least with GO they are using it in all there servers, so you know they will be supporting it for a while.
- spankalee 13y ago
  Two corrections: 1) We are not using Go in all of our servers. Java, C++, and Python are very prominent. Go is just getting started internally. 2) Dart is being used internally, we won't be dropping it.
  - cpeterso 13y ago
    Can you say which internal projects are using Dart at Google? Were they new systems, rewrites, or evolutions of existing JS systems?
    - freshman19 13y ago
      They got some patches from the finance department and Google were really insistent on adding big integers to JS so it looks like they're using it for currency. Woo... exciting.
  - alvivi 13y ago
    Dart is an unilateral project aiming to: "ultimate goal is to replace JavaScript", "rescue browsers from JavaScript" or "Google preps Dart to challenge JavaScript". Being open source here, is not good enough.
bradleyjg 13y ago
As someone professionally responsible for maintaining and extending a legacy GWT project, I couldn't agree more with this view. I'm no longer willing to tie my career to google's fickle attention span. Particularly since as I understand it the dart team has some of the same personnel from the old gwt team. They are masters at the art of soft deprecation through neglect.
- magicalist 13y ago
  Wait, what? My sympathies for maintaining legacy GWT, but that isn't at all equivalent to Dart except in that they both have JS compile targets. Go is at least a somewhat more reasonable comparison, but still isn't great. The biggest problem with any legacy GWT project is all the widgets people loved to make and use which grafted unnaturally to JS and the DOM, and certainly not the code transpiler, which is all that really matters here. Dart is lead by Lars Bak out of Aarhus, which IIRC wasn't even a Google office location before they hired Lars to do V8. Even if some people transfered over from GWT, I doubt it would be many, and I don't see how it would have substantial impact with someone like Lars at the top. And it's been 7 years since GWT was released. Yes, yes, enterprise needs whatever, but many web technologies fade away over time. It sucks if you were an early adopter and were heavily invested, but at a certain threshold, no one cares anymore. Is YUI's nearly negligible update rate a sign of Yahoo's fickle attention span? No, because no one uses it anymore (sorry YUI users), and at a certain point you have to cut your losses. If the community is self sustaining enough, it can pick up the slack with these open source frameworks, but if it's not, I really can't manage any indignation. It happens sometimes. I'm not advocating using Dart in production (I would advocate just learning JS if you're targeting browsers anyway...), but this critique is specious at best, not least because the SDK is apparently just entering beta, so it says right on the tin not to found your production pipeline on it.
  - camus 13y ago
    > I'm not advocating using Dart in production then why anybody would want to use it? as much as i dislike MS , their TypeScript language makes more sense than Dart which feels DOA already.
casual_slacker 13y ago
I don't think this is a problem. It's rather uncommon for languages to be supported in the first place. Rather, independent contractors become experts in the language and pick up the slack.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> Another similar worry: if Dart really does take off, will Google not just drop support for other browsers besides Chrome from stock Dart? If Dart, an open-source toolchain, takes off (e.g., becomes wildly popular with developers) and then Google chooses to limit future Dart versions to only work with Chrome, I would expect a fork to become popular in a heartbeat. I mean, look at other popular open source projects whose sponsor/maintainer has done things unwelcome by the community (e.g., OpenOffice, MySQL.)
chrisbuc 13y ago
"Dart feels like exactly the type of service that Google will just drop in the future" The difference is that Dart is not a service, and cannot just be turned off. It's an open-source language, and "at worst" could be community maintained.

by RyanZAG 13y ago

DonnyV 13y ago

This is exactly why I'm not touching it. At least with GO they are using it in all there servers, so you know they will be supporting it for a while.

spankalee 13y ago
Two corrections: 1) We are not using Go in all of our servers. Java, C++, and Python are very prominent. Go is just getting started internally. 2) Dart is being used internally, we won't be dropping it.
- cpeterso 13y ago
  Can you say which internal projects are using Dart at Google? Were they new systems, rewrites, or evolutions of existing JS systems?
  - freshman19 13y ago
    They got some patches from the finance department and Google were really insistent on adding big integers to JS so it looks like they're using it for currency. Woo... exciting.
- alvivi 13y ago
  Dart is an unilateral project aiming to: "ultimate goal is to replace JavaScript", "rescue browsers from JavaScript" or "Google preps Dart to challenge JavaScript". Being open source here, is not good enough.

bradleyjg 13y ago

As someone professionally responsible for maintaining and extending a legacy GWT project, I couldn't agree more with this view. I'm no longer willing to tie my career to google's fickle attention span. Particularly since as I understand it the dart team has some of the same personnel from the old gwt team. They are masters at the art of soft deprecation through neglect.

magicalist 13y ago
Wait, what? My sympathies for maintaining legacy GWT, but that isn't at all equivalent to Dart except in that they both have JS compile targets. Go is at least a somewhat more reasonable comparison, but still isn't great. The biggest problem with any legacy GWT project is all the widgets people loved to make and use which grafted unnaturally to JS and the DOM, and certainly not the code transpiler, which is all that really matters here. Dart is lead by Lars Bak out of Aarhus, which IIRC wasn't even a Google office location before they hired Lars to do V8. Even if some people transfered over from GWT, I doubt it would be many, and I don't see how it would have substantial impact with someone like Lars at the top. And it's been 7 years since GWT was released. Yes, yes, enterprise needs whatever, but many web technologies fade away over time. It sucks if you were an early adopter and were heavily invested, but at a certain threshold, no one cares anymore. Is YUI's nearly negligible update rate a sign of Yahoo's fickle attention span? No, because no one uses it anymore (sorry YUI users), and at a certain point you have to cut your losses. If the community is self sustaining enough, it can pick up the slack with these open source frameworks, but if it's not, I really can't manage any indignation. It happens sometimes. I'm not advocating using Dart in production (I would advocate just learning JS if you're targeting browsers anyway...), but this critique is specious at best, not least because the SDK is apparently just entering beta, so it says right on the tin not to found your production pipeline on it.
- camus 13y ago
  > I'm not advocating using Dart in production then why anybody would want to use it? as much as i dislike MS , their TypeScript language makes more sense than Dart which feels DOA already.

casual_slacker 13y ago

I don't think this is a problem. It's rather uncommon for languages to be supported in the first place. Rather, independent contractors become experts in the language and pick up the slack.

dragonwriter 13y ago

> Another similar worry: if Dart really does take off, will Google not just drop support for other browsers besides Chrome from stock Dart? If Dart, an open-source toolchain, takes off (e.g., becomes wildly popular with developers) and then Google chooses to limit future Dart versions to only work with Chrome, I would expect a fork to become popular in a heartbeat. I mean, look at other popular open source projects whose sponsor/maintainer has done things unwelcome by the community (e.g., OpenOffice, MySQL.)

chrisbuc 13y ago

"Dart feels like exactly the type of service that Google will just drop in the future" The difference is that Dart is not a service, and cannot just be turned off. It's an open-source language, and "at worst" could be community maintained.