17 ms·

How serious is Google about Dart?

95 points by pauljonas 13y ago

RyanZAG 13y ago
Never rely on Google for anything - always have alternatives. In the case of Dart, the alternative is that it is open source, which means if (read: when) Google drops Dart, other developers can continue to support it. However, Dart is a 'full stack' solution. This means that any developer taking over Dart would have to support the IDE, the VM, the javascript transcoder, the language, integration with new browser features, cross browser compatibility, etc. This is practically impossible for hobbyists to do properly. Why would Google drop Dart? Google is almost guaranteed to drop any project that does not have high traction and/or high income within a few years of release. Dart has neither income nor traction. If Google does not drop it, I will be very surprised and impressed. I highly recommend avoiding Dart, but obviously the choice is yours. You've been warned. EDIT: Just to add, Google can artificially increase traction of Dart by putting the Dart runtime inside Chrome and using that as a weapon to increase Chrome adoption, similar to Microsoft's ActiveX strategy. If Google does this it would be a pretty evil thing to do and go against the spirit of the web. If your ethics are a bit lacking, you may want to try betting on this effect which would create a demand for Dart dev houses in the future, and could make you some cash.
- _greim_ 13y ago
  Google will drop Dart because they will inevitably realize what the rest of us already know: Dart won't displace JS, even a little, as the lingua franca of the web. Anybody with even half a brain can see this. It's an exercise in futility, like trying to build a whole new web browser and expecting it to dominate within five years' time. Including Internet Explorer. Worldwide. Such fantasies are ridiculous and a waste of everybody's time. Get back to the drudgery of your actual lives, folks.
  - Peaker 13y ago
    You must be a reasonable man. The world does change, even dramatically, sometimes. (Not that I believe Dart is interesting or useful enough to drive dramatic change, I find your approach overly pessimistic).
    - myko 13y ago
      I'm 95% sure the comment you replied to was completely sarcastic.
      - _greim_ 13y ago
        Yes, it was indeed sarcasm. Lame, hastily-written sarcasm :)
- danmaz74 13y ago
  Does Google use Dart internally, like they do with Go? I would check about that to understand how serious they are about it.
  - kyrra 13y ago
    I was talking a Dart guy about this recently. They have no projects they can talk about, but there are a few teams within Google using Dart right now. I'm guessing we'll hear about these eventually, but for now they are keeping them quiet.
  - bradleyjg 13y ago
    GWT was used internally, by AdWords even. That didn't stop it from getting dropped on the floor when the new shiny came along.
    - kyrra 13y ago
      Google still has a team of 10 people working on GWT (they have no developer advocate anymore, so no one really advertises it). GWT is considered "infrastructure" by Google now. AdSense/AdWords both use GWT I believe (and that won't be changing anytime soon, so Google will continue to support GWT. There are also other small tools from Google written in GWT (Flights, their jobs site, and others I'm sure). GWT doesn't have nearly the team it used to have, but its still being supported by Google. EDIT: to add, GWT has recently transitioned to a non-Google site[1], run by the GWT committee. As well, a GWT focused conference is being organized by Vaadin[2]. [1] http://www.gwtproject.org/ http://www.gwtproject.org/ [2] http://gwtcreate.com/ http://gwtcreate.com/
      - bradleyjg 13y ago
        Yes, I know they have people working on it. Among other things this work consists of closing 90% of existing bugs as assumed stale. I'm sure that if you have code that works today it will continue to work if you change nothing (although there is talk of dropping support for IE8) but there are a lot of rough edges that will now never be improved. That's not optimal for people who bought the story that google was selling to developers just two years ago at IO -- that this was the wave of the future and well worth devoting effort to learning and pitching to clients.
- RobAtticus 13y ago
  This seems overly negative, and for rather simplistic reasons. If Dart is successful internally, I'm sure they'll keep working on it. Making their developers' lives easier, and making their web properties faster/better is easily worth it for them. Also, your edit doesn't strike me as evil. It's only evil if they prevent other vendors from putting in a Dart VM. The language is opensource, and so is Chromium where their VM implementation would be, so that seems unlikely. They'd have to put in quirks that make it "work best" on Chrome that they somehow hide from the competition. I mean, was SPDY an evil move? It was originally baked into Chrome but the spec and implementation were open. It just took Firefox and others longer to decide to add support.
  - pcwalton 13y ago
    The DOM memory model that all browsers use is incompatible with Dart (or any "second language" for the Web). That includes Chrome, by the way: that's why they need the Oilpan project which completely rewrites DOM memory management from scratch. In practice this is going to be a blocker for other engines to "just adopt" the Dart VM. (These concerns were raised, and ignored, on webkit-dev when Google first proposed Dart support.)
    - magicalist 13y ago
      This seems like a weirdly combative comment. This certainly isn't the primary technical (or emotional) argument against Dart. To translate for others: browsers tied the DOM memory model tightly to the single Javascript VM because it was a lot easier that way, and expanding support to multiple VMs will take a lot of work. This is one reason why you don't see many browser forks running with the "let's just add python to browsers" idea that so many have had. It's also why we still have no canvas or WebGL in web workers: no one has a DOM that sufficiently supports multi-threaded access. I have no idea what "ignored" means in this context, since Dart bindings obviously weren't added to webkit, and Oilpan is replacing the GC model for the DOM in blink. That might make it easier to support Dart (that's still only something I've read here on HN, but I don't follow Dart lists), but it's a performance improvement that has long been needed. Try tracing garbage collection in Chrome sometime in an app that manipulates the DOM; the typical pause will spend most of its time trying to collect memory on the DOM side, not the Javascript side, even for some of the simplest DOM manipulations. My understanding is that (somewhat humorously, in the context of the above) this is because of the more inefficient bindings created to allow V8 to work with Webkit, where it used to be that only JavaScriptCore bindings were needed.
- ericssmith 13y ago
  "Google can artificially increase traction of Dart by putting the Dart runtime inside Chrome and using that as a weapon to increase Chrome adoption" Chrome itself gained in traction because V8 was faster for a while. Putting Dart VM in Chrome and getting another competitive leap seems like a no-brainer. Not sure how that is evil or going against the spirit of the web. It's a one-liner to have it use the Javascript version, making it available in other browsers. It's not like ActiveX, as far as I can see. In practice, Dart is a decent enough compile-to-Javascript alternative with a low barrier to entry. And it works as advertised. Easy to learn, use, and debug. And the claims about structure are true. As far as I can tell, the lack of conviction is as much about seeing where developers are headed as anything. Why spend a lot if there won't be adoption. It's a tough call for Google in a pretty crowded and evolving space (ie, compiling to Javascript). I should add tha NaCl and LLVM complicate the vision of the future for web technologies as well. Hard to place a bet at the moment.
  - kevingadd 13y ago
    Given the presence of modern technology like Emscripten, it would be a 'one-liner' to load a compiled-to-JS equivalent of any native ActiveX plugin (assuming it does only things the browser can do; same goes for Dart - Dart2JS is not going to be able to implement SIMD or threads or anything else that the native Dart runtime adds). It's against the spirit of the web because: 1. Dart is controlled by a single player 2. Dart was implemented by a single player 3. Dart was designed for the needs of a single player 4. Dart was designed in secret before being released to the world Those four factors combined make it seem evil even if it's not, and definitely contributed to the negative reaction it got from WebKit. If using Dart means relying on Dart2JS (which it does, because Google completely failed to get any other browser vendors to consider adopting it so far), then Dart is now just another competitor to things like GWT, Emscripten, TypeScript, etc. Dart2JS at least delivers reasonable performance thus far but it's hardly a compelling option compared to actually writing the language that runs in the browser, especially given that it has an entirely new home-grown set of libraries that aren't mature yet. If Dart is still alive 5 years from now, however, a lot of these factors could change. If it manages to prove itself somehow, maybe a Dart VM would get into WebKit or Gecko (seems unlikely due to implementation hurdles though), and the libraries will absolutely be mature by then.
- lucisferre 13y ago
  > Just to add, Google can artificially increase traction of Dart by putting the Dart runtime inside Chrome and using that as a weapon to increase Chrome adoption, similar to Microsoft's ActiveX strategy. If Google does this it would be a pretty evil thing to do and go against the spirit of the web. This is entirely hyperbolic. ActiveX was an entirely closed source system including the browser it ran on. Not true for Dart or Chrome. In fact you can already get Dartium (http://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and-running/contents/ch04-tools-dartium.html http://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and-running/contents/ch...). These scenarios are not even remotely similar.
  - kevingadd 13y ago
    So far the response to the suggestion of adding a native Dart runtime to anything other than Chromium proper has been extremely negative. WebKit didn't want it, Mozilla doesn't seem to want it. Maybe Opera will include it since they're using Blink? It may not be a Microsoft feature but it's basically being treated the same as one. Native Client is getting similar treatment.
    - spankalee 13y ago
      The point is that Dart will run on all browsers. ActiveX only ran on IE. Dart's also friendly with the web. It has a full DOM API and JS-interop. It's not a plugin.
      - kevingadd 13y ago
        Dart2JS will run on all browsers. Dart currently will only run in Chrome. This is an important distinction.
        mythz 13y ago
        Dart currently only runs in Dartium, There is no DartVM in Chrome which just runs the Dart2JS version live every other browser. Also I don't think it's clear whether or not Opera will include a DartVM by virtue of Blink.
- gwern 13y ago
  > Why would Google drop Dart? Google is almost guaranteed to drop any project that does not have high traction and/or high income within a few years of release. Dart has neither income nor traction. If Google does not drop it, I will be very surprised and impressed. Likewise. As it happens, my model's* 5-year survival prediction (=Dart being supported by Google in ~March 2018) is just 21%. I can't say I really disagree. * http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns
  - hughw 13y ago
    That's a great piece of work there, gwern.
    - gwern 13y ago
      Thanks.
- mythz 13y ago
  Dart is a solution for building and maintaining complex web apps. Googles JS web apps has 100's of engineers working on it spanning millions LOC. Google doesn't think it's possible to develop at this scale with vanilla JS which is why they've invested a ton of effort in developing the Closure Compiler/Library and GWT (i.e. what their big JS Web Apps use). The problems with the previous strategies is that they add boilerplate, artefacts and complexity on top of JS that slows down their build times to the point where some devs have to wait 24mins to see a live/edit reload cycle. Dart was built from the ground-up to manage complexity and to provide a consistent development experience with the goal of providing the fastest edit/reload dev cycles possible. As it's also built with the input of the VM engineers who helped create StrongTalk, Hotspot JVM, V8 VMs they are able to add features that enable a high-performance VM implementation and enable features like 'Snapshots' to provide instant start up times. Google will never drop support for their 2 crown jewels, Chrome or Android. When Dart gets into Chrome and some of their big internet properties start to depend on it, you can pretty much guarantee that they'll never drop support for it. One of the mandates Google has is to improve the web, make it faster and make it possible for everyone to build richer more interactive web experiences so more people use and spend more time on the Internet. More time on the Internet means more time on Google, so developing and investing in technologies like Dart indirectly benefits them. It's also why any investments on improving the Internet remain supported, free and Open Source e.g WebP/M, SPDY, Chromium/Blink, V8, Closure Library, GWT, mod_pagespeed, Polymer and now Dart. People like to confuse Google's dropping of support for their products where everything they create is fair game and can be dropped at anytime, what's not looked at, is how the product to relates to their entire ecosystem, whether it adds value and is in a growing technology/market.
- spankalee 13y ago
  Standard disclaimer, I work on Dart. And normally I'd avoid engaging a borderline troll, but this is such a terrible comment, in so many ways, that I have to speak up. > Never rely on Google for anything First, you're expectation that Google will drop Dart is based on what exactly? A few SaaS product cancelations? The "never rely on Google" meme is getting so old, mainly because it's overly applied to Google when all SaaS providers have this issue, and it's been a known downside for years: when product support ends for an installed app, you still have the old installed app to use, when support is ended for SaaS users have a problem. I hope this can be mitigated one day, but that's a whole other topic. The differences with Google is that we have a ton of users even for our "small" products, and there's a single name to attach attention to, rather than the numerous shutdowns that have happened in other companies, or the startups that have bee bought and killed. The important bit for the discussion at hand is that Dart is not even _anything_ as a service. It's a set of installed, open source compilers and libraries. They will continue to work in the (unlikely, IMO) event that Google drops support. > This means that any developer taking over Dart would have to support the IDE, the VM, the javascript transcoder, the language, integration with new browser features, cross browser compatibility, etc. Dart's more of a collection of independent pieces. If Google ever did completely drop Dart I'm pretty sure that the parts could be maintained by the community (assuming the community hits critical mass). The dart2js compiler is the most important part and it's well structured, easy to understand code. The IDE could be abandoned in favor of plugins for WebStorm (already maintained by IDEA), Sublime, vim, etc. > Dart has neither income nor traction. Dart will never have income, that's not its purpose. Dart's purpose is to make web development easier, more productive and more scalable, and web apps themselves faster. This goal is both for internal development, for which we badly need something like Dart, and for everyone else because we want to see more and better web apps. As for traction, if Dart doesn't get any traction (after it's actually released, and had a good chance to succeed of course!), inside Google or outside, then it probably _should_ be abandoned, right? In that case, who exactly is there to care that it's not developed anymore? I've heard some people point to GWT as an example of what might happen to Dart. I don't agree, but for the sake of argument, let's look at where GWT is: 1) There's an official community maintaining GWT, 2) Google still has a team working on GWT, and large projects using it. 3) GWT will still get better as Java gets better. There are other factors that apply to GWT and it's language that don't apply to Dart. If Dart's fate was ever the same as GWT, I'd say it'd be a pretty soft landing for everyone. > Just to add, Google can artificially increase traction of Dart by putting the Dart runtime inside Chrome and using that as a weapon to increase Chrome adoption, similar to Microsoft's ActiveX strategy. This is still a ridiculous comparison. ActiveX was a plug-in architecture. Dart compiles to JavaScript. We support all "modern" browsers, IE9 and up. Look, we've made no bones about wanting to get the VM into browsers some day. And obviously, being part of the Chrome team, we'd like to see it in Chrome. Lars pointed out at Google I/O that there's work already being done to pave the way for this on the memory management side. The Dart VM does enable faster and quicker to startup applications, no doubt. But we all understand that Dart will be distributed as JavaScript for the foreseeable future, and we do considerable work to ensure that programs behave the same in dart2js and the VM, and that the JS output is very fast. The Dart and Chrome teams firmly believe that the adoption of Dart will entirely depend on it's success as a compile-to-JS language. How Dart helps developers will be its main draw, and hopefully there's organic demand for the VM as an accelerator for apps that already work well across the web. This will not be "evil" in anyway, but one of many ways that the browser vendors have pushed the web forward. There are so many examples of a vendor pushing something that's initially totally or somewhat proprietary but end up being a great thing for the web, that only comparing Dart to ActiveX is just juvenile and annoying. Consider JavaScript itself, XHR, <canvas>, CSS, SVG, WebGL, setImmediate() and so many other DOM APIs, CSS extensions like rounded corners, shadows, transforms, etc. Some of these have actually been much more backwards-incompatible than Dart which primarily _compiles_to_JS_. The FUD around Dart is just incredible. No matter though. We see the benefit every day that we luckily get to code in Dart, and so does our community. Those who wish to reap the benefits Dart can opt-in and those who don't can ignore it.
- jrockway 13y ago
  EDIT: Just to add, Google can artificially increase traction of Dart by putting the Dart runtime inside Chrome and using that as a weapon to increase Chrome adoption, similar to Microsoft's ActiveX strategy. If Google does this it would be a pretty evil thing to do and go against the spirit of the web. Couldn't Microsoft put Dart in IE today? This argument boils down to: "nobody should ever work on any programming language, because any company could add support for it to a web browser." It's technically true.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Never rely on Google for anything - always have alternatives. In the case of Dart, the alternative is that it is open source, which means if (read: when) Google drops Dart, other developers can continue to support it. Well, if we're being pragmatic and cautious ("never rely on Google for anything"), then expecting Dart to get support post Google because "it's open source" is an even more dangerous idea. For one, all of Dart's core developers are Google employees. If Google kills it, I seriously doubt others will take their place. We have many precedents of abandoned open source projects where the community consistent 90% of some companies paid employees. And it's not like Dart has gained any traction from programers using it to get stuff done either.
andybak 13y ago
Developers. Developers. Developers... I'd love to know if there's an internal debate inside Google and if they are aware of how much recent decisions have damaged their reputation amongst a critical demographic. I could not understand the decision to drop Chrome Frame. It seemed like a good strategic product but even more so - a lot of people had staked their reputation on a technology choice because of it's existence. These people were the thin end of a wedge inside enterprise cultures that were historically dominated by Microsoft evangelists. Google has now pissed off these people and made them look bad.
- alperakgun 13y ago
  for example i need a charting solution, and google charts seem good enough.. but now would they abandon it?... all google bets are risky...
  - kyrra 13y ago
    That could be said for any service you pay for. Large companies will close down projects that aren't doing well. Small companies can close their doors when they run out of money.
- iopq 13y ago
  After they had enough market share with Chrome they just figured they could force people to install Chrome.
  - andybak 13y ago
    They could believe that about consumers but if I find it hard to believe they were naive enough to think this would work in large organizations. So what were they thinking? Is the number of large organizations stuck on old IE (<=8) not important enough to Google? Or - more worryingly - did they not think it through properly? I just don't see how that decision got made. Even freezing/slowing development on Chrome Frame would have been bearable - but dropping it?
    - 13y ago
iopq 13y ago
> Still forced to support IE 7/8 I want people who use this shit to die already.
ams6110 13y ago
I hope Google will provide some iron clad guarantees that their Dart project will be around for the next 5 years 5 years is a lifetime in web technology. 5 years ago nobody was using coffeescript, angular, ember, or any of that. They didn't exist, or if they did they were crude ancestors of what they are today. I just don't think you can have this expectation of any guarantees like that in web development. Things move too fast. If you want that kind of guarantee, use open source stuff and acknowledge that you'll have to support it yourself when the rest of the world moves on.
- kintamanimatt 13y ago
  Here's my problem with this line of thinking: Dart is supposed to replace one third of the triad of core technologies web developers use: HTML, JS, and CSS. It doesn't appear that in the long term it's intended to be transcompiled to JavaScript. CoffeeScript is only intended to be an alternative that transcompiles to JS. There's no effort to build a CoffeeScript VM. (C8? CoffeeMonkey?) Angular, Ember, etc are just frameworks. They're not likely to be as long-lived as the triad of front-end web development technologies because the creation of such a framework has a significantly lower barrier to entry and adoption. There's no W3C committee overseeing development and there will be no W3C draft or standard for any of these somewhat ephemeral frameworks. Core web development technologies are very stable and their development, deployment, and adoption happens quite slowly; on the order of decades. If Dart does become widely adopted (and with the support of browser markers) it'll likely remain in place for a long, long time, far longer than the latest JavaScript framework or veneer language de jure. Even if Dart does become widely adopted, Dart hasn't got a hope of truly replacing JavaScript, at least for the foreseeable future (>10 years), as both a Dart VM and a JS VM would have to coexist in all browsers for reasons of backward compatibility. Yay, browser codebase bloat!
andyl 13y ago
Dart is part of Google's strategy to replace open-standards with its own proprietary walled-garden. Let's hope it doesn't work. Stay away from Dart.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  Stay away from Kool Aid. ;-) Really, this is unfounded and unjustified speculation.
  - andybak 13y ago
    As silly as the preceding comment was. it's becoming common to hear similar sentiments and it just shows that Google has a severe PR problem amongst it's people who would previously have sung it's praises.
    - cromwellian 13y ago
      The PR problems come with success and size. It's impossible for any large organization, no matter how "non-evil" to avoid criticism and conspiracies. Google has done better than most in still maintaining good will, but obviously PRISM isn't helping, and Microsoft and Apple communities are both pushing the privacy angle. (If you really think these concerns are totally organically driven, I encourage you to look at complaints about 'google tracking you' before/after Android was launched, or follow the trail of Microsoft shell organizations and their whisper campaigns) Google commands tremendous marketshare with Chrome now, and so people are going to be hyper-sensitive about anything it does. But I would read PPK on Blink for example (http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2013/04/blink.html http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2013/04/blink.html) to see how Google is treating the Web. Honestly, the Web has been driven forward tremendously in the last few years with HTML5, CSS3, WebRTC, etc but Javascript hasn't budged much, although performance has increased, the warts of the language have not been fixed, and TC39 is taking too long. That's why you're seeing everyone create languages that compile down to JS. My biggest concerns are that if the problems of the Web platform aren't fixed, especially for mobile, a whole generation of people will be raised on native apps, and the most amazing platform for distribution of federated, transparent information in human history will lose. Simply put, the Web is more important than Javascript.
INTPenis 13y ago
Before Google Reader was cancelled I don't remember people worrying this much online about each new Google service and its longevity. Seems like a non-issue to me. When we run out of real criticism against Google we just make some up because they're big and.. you know.. playa hatin'. ;) Try to remember that it's first and foremost a search engine with ad-revenue. Anything else is a product of a liberal work environment and driven employees.
- smacktoward 13y ago
  > Try to remember that it's first and foremost a search engine with ad-revenue. Anything else is a product of a liberal work environment and driven employees. But that's actually a really good reason to hesitate a bit before betting your own project's success on anything they put out that isn't directly related to the search engine or the ad products. It's not "playa hatin'" to recognize that things from Google that aren't strategic to them may get dropped some day, it's just being pragmatic.
cromwellian 13y ago
This article isn't about Dart, it's about IE6 and ChromeFrame. Microsoft itself is discontinuing support for IE6 next April. Period. It's dead. You're blaming Google for not supporting a dead platform that not even Microsoft is going to support any longer. It's time to upgrade your internal systems. Don't blame Google for not wasting resources on a shitty broken browser that causes developers to waste time supporting. IE6 needs to die, die, die.
- andybak 13y ago
  Chrome Frame is also useful for later IE versions. IE8 is becoming the thorn that IE6 once was.
mark_l_watson 13y ago
I was playing with Dart and found it really nice for both server and client side development. However, I ended up setting Dart aside (as I did for ClojureScript) and worked on my JavaScript skills.
- spankalee 13y ago
  I hope you check it out again as we reach 1.0. We're going to be able to give server-side some more attention after 1.0 too.
cmccabe 13y ago
Google didn't have a choice about Chrome Frame. The new Internet Explorer 10 doesn't support plugins that are as invasive as Chrome Frame. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh968248%28v=vs.85%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh968248%28v=vs.8... Chrome Frame on older Internet Explorer versions shouldn't really need to be updated that much, since those browsers aren't changing that much. Also, I find it really hard to believe that the kind of IT department that decrees that everyone has to use IE6 (or whatever) would ever allow such an invasive third-party plugin as Chrome Frame in the first place. The limited browser compatibility of dart.js is a real issue and probably is a dealbreaker for some enterprise situations. But there's no need to bring Google Reader into this-- it has literally nothing to do with it. The other thing which everyone seems to be missing here is that even if Google does "become bored with Dart," there will still be an open source community to support it. Coffeescript has been around forever without any sugar daddy. A big part of the reason for using open source technologies is to avoid vendor lock-in and other similar questions about the future.
- lucisferre 13y ago
  The argument some have made is the supporting Dart is much more complex than supporting Coffeescript and it will be hard for an entirely ragtag open source community effort to back it up without serious corporate involvement from one or more sources. I'd be much more likely to buy into Dart (and I really do want to) if Google could reach out and partner with others (say Mozilla) so Dart support doesn't have a single point of failure.
- bradleyjg 13y ago
  It is very difficult to move a non-trivial product from corporate developed with source code available to community developed even if both are technically open source. If things like design docs & decisions, the main bug tracker, commit rights, and so on are all internal you end up with no one with the institutional knowledge to take over if the company decides to drop it. The most famous example of this is probably the open sourcing of Netscape Navigator which lead to a four year gap before the next release, due to a ground up rewrite.
_random_ 13y ago
It is loosing to TypeScript already.
adrianlmm 13y ago
Greetings, I'm someone who is using Dart in production I can tell you that is promising and the community is growing. The only problem I see is that Dart developers are focusing to much in the newer stuff w/o ironing the basics first, for example, the DateTime datatype can't parse this: "2013-08-03 12:00" but can parse this: "20130742", and to me is more important to work in those basics than all the fancy Canvas stuff or polymer. We don't know the level of compromise Google has with Dart, I'm taking the risk cause I think is worth it.
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  It's somewhat disconcerting for Dart to merely be seen as "promising", especially given its competition. It would take a lot of effort to do worse than JavaScript. CoffeeScript is basically just JavaScript with a Ruby-inspired syntax. TypeScript is only a very minimal set of improvements to JavaScript. If it's doing things right, it should be blowing all three of those away with ease, especially given its origin. The fact that its uptake is so slow suggests that it isn't competing against them very well, which I take to be a bad sign going forward.
  - adrianlmm 13y ago
    To make this clear, when I say "Promising" I don't mean it as something vague, Dart is in beta now and it will hit the 1.0 status this year, so start using it and learning it today ain't that crazy.
  - spankalee 13y ago
    Dart's uptake is slow because it hasn't really been released yet. It's pre-1.0 and has been evolving pretty rapidly until recently. I'm not worried.
- sethladd 13y ago
  Did you file a bug for the date parsing? Thanks for using Dart!
michaelwww 13y ago
> How serious is Google about Dart? It depends. I spent a lot of time looking at Dart in the first part of this year. My impression is that the team developing Dart is very serious and enthusiastic about it. Dart makes web development fun again. It's easy to try things and throw them away if you get a better idea in the process. Building large apps is easy. The success of Dart doesn't only depend on success in the browser, because a lot of effort is being put into Dart on the server, where it hopes to compete with Nodejs and replace Java for some uses. Another motivation for Dart is that it is not influenced in any way by Oracle, who has sued Google over Java. Dart may shine on mobile devices where old browsers are not an issue, that remains to be seen. Who is not enthusiastic about Dart at Google? I would say the Chrome team and the Closure team, based on a lot of reading and watching videos, are not enthusiastic. This is just my impression. I have no inside information. As far as I know, Dart is not being used internally. The Chrome Frame issue caused me to switch to TypeScript, which I also really like. It's not as much fun as Dart, but it certainly makes JavaScript a lot more verifiably correct, with type annotations making code refactoring and type checking possible. TypeScript is an ok alternative to Dart. They feel similar, they each have their uses. I wouldn't bet the company on Dart, but I would on TypeScript, which could go away and you'd still have perfectly readable and sensible JavaScript files to work with. As Anders Hejlsberg (designer of C# and TypeScript) says, "we don't obfuscate your code." It's easy enough to learn Dart. There are places even now where it makes sense to use Dart. If JavaScript is an old internal combustion engine car, then TypeScript is one with automatic transmission and power steering, while Dart is a new electric car. I'll drive all three as long as they get me where I'm going.
- spankalee 13y ago
  FYI, Dart is starting to be used internally, on multiple projects, and some pretty large ones. And Dart's part of the Chrome team, if Chrome wasn't enthusiastic about Dart, Dart wouldn't exist.
  - michaelwww 13y ago
    I get my impression from this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlJob8K_OwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlJob8K_OwE Skip to &t=17m26s and you can hear them talk about it. Judge for yourself.
slm_HN 13y ago
Didn't Larry Page say "we're putting more wood behind fewer darts" when he took over?
- packetslave 13y ago
  fewer arrows
jdonaldson 13y ago
FWIW, Haxe is a solid alternative if you're looking into alt-js or cross platform (mobile) development: http://haxe.org/ http://haxe.org/ It doesn't have the money of Google, but it has been around for 8 years, and is backed by its own non-profit foundation. It just recently hit version 3.0: http://haxe.org/manual/haxe3/features http://haxe.org/manual/haxe3/features It continues to make steps forward with new cross-platform development frameworks like openfl. http://www.openfl.org/ http://www.openfl.org/
eliben 13y ago
I am puzzled by low-quality, hyperbolic, panicky articles like this. And I'm even more surprised by the reaction they cause on HN. http://blog.chromium.org/2013/06/retiring-chrome-frame.html http://blog.chromium.org/2013/06/retiring-chrome-frame.html seems like a pretty good reasoning w.r.t stopping updating Chrome Frame and lists alternatives. What's all this noise about? And what the hell does this have to do with Dart?
- hatsix 13y ago
  Yakov Fain is a world-class whiner and master of hyperbole. He was always the "squeaky wheel" in the Flash/Flex community, and it doesn't surprise me that he's still whining. Why it's being picked up by HN is beyond me... maybe because Google is the favorite scapegoat recently? Certainly few people bothered reading what he wrote and just started commenting/complaining. It's astonishing to me that Google is getting flak for dropping (in 5 months) what amounts to a 3rd-party-patch for a browser that'll be turning 5 years old. They already dropped support for IE8 in Google Apps, and jQuery dropped support several months ago. If Fain wants to play with fancy new technologies, he should find clients who want to use new technologies.
coldtea 13y ago
>During the meeting one person said that about 15% of our users are still working with older browsers and we don’t want to lose them if Dart-generated JavaScript won’t work in Internet Explorer 7 or 8. I immediately answered that this wouldn’t be an issue, because several years ago Google created a smart way to automatically download Chrome’s JavaScript VM if the application runs inside IE. The name of this smart solution is Google Frame. Err, Google Frame is not a "solution" for Dart not running on older IE browsers and it doesn't just download "Chrome's Javascript VM". It's (was) a way to install a different web engine for IE altogether, based on Chrome. Second, it's not "automatically downloading" (which might give the impression that it's transparent to the user) -- you have to install it.

95 points by pauljonas 13y ago

Never rely on Google for anything - always have alternatives. In the case of Dart, the alternative is that it is open source, which means if (read: when) Google drops Dart, other developers can continue to support it. However, Dart is a 'full stack' solution. This means that any developer taking over Dart would have to support the IDE, the VM, the javascript transcoder, the language, integration with new browser features, cross browser compatibility, etc. This is practically impossible for hobbyists to do properly. Why would Google drop Dart? Google is almost guaranteed to drop any project that does not have high traction and/or high income within a few years of release. Dart has neither income nor traction. If Google does not drop it, I will be very surprised and impressed. I highly recommend avoiding Dart, but obviously the choice is yours. You've been warned. EDIT: Just to add, Google can artificially increase traction of Dart by putting the Dart runtime inside Chrome and using that as a weapon to increase Chrome adoption, similar to Microsoft's ActiveX strategy. If Google does this it would be a pretty evil thing to do and go against the spirit of the web. If your ethics are a bit lacking, you may want to try betting on this effect which would create a demand for Dart dev houses in the future, and could make you some cash.

_greim_ 13y ago
Google will drop Dart because they will inevitably realize what the rest of us already know: Dart won't displace JS, even a little, as the lingua franca of the web. Anybody with even half a brain can see this. It's an exercise in futility, like trying to build a whole new web browser and expecting it to dominate within five years' time. Including Internet Explorer. Worldwide. Such fantasies are ridiculous and a waste of everybody's time. Get back to the drudgery of your actual lives, folks.
- Peaker 13y ago
  You must be a reasonable man. The world does change, even dramatically, sometimes. (Not that I believe Dart is interesting or useful enough to drive dramatic change, I find your approach overly pessimistic).
  - myko 13y ago
    I'm 95% sure the comment you replied to was completely sarcastic.
    - _greim_ 13y ago
      Yes, it was indeed sarcasm. Lame, hastily-written sarcasm :)
danmaz74 13y ago
Does Google use Dart internally, like they do with Go? I would check about that to understand how serious they are about it.
- kyrra 13y ago
  I was talking a Dart guy about this recently. They have no projects they can talk about, but there are a few teams within Google using Dart right now. I'm guessing we'll hear about these eventually, but for now they are keeping them quiet.
- bradleyjg 13y ago
  GWT was used internally, by AdWords even. That didn't stop it from getting dropped on the floor when the new shiny came along.
  - kyrra 13y ago
    Google still has a team of 10 people working on GWT (they have no developer advocate anymore, so no one really advertises it). GWT is considered "infrastructure" by Google now. AdSense/AdWords both use GWT I believe (and that won't be changing anytime soon, so Google will continue to support GWT. There are also other small tools from Google written in GWT (Flights, their jobs site, and others I'm sure). GWT doesn't have nearly the team it used to have, but its still being supported by Google. EDIT: to add, GWT has recently transitioned to a non-Google site[1], run by the GWT committee. As well, a GWT focused conference is being organized by Vaadin[2]. [1] http://www.gwtproject.org/ http://www.gwtproject.org/ [2] http://gwtcreate.com/ http://gwtcreate.com/
    - bradleyjg 13y ago
      Yes, I know they have people working on it. Among other things this work consists of closing 90% of existing bugs as assumed stale. I'm sure that if you have code that works today it will continue to work if you change nothing (although there is talk of dropping support for IE8) but there are a lot of rough edges that will now never be improved. That's not optimal for people who bought the story that google was selling to developers just two years ago at IO -- that this was the wave of the future and well worth devoting effort to learning and pitching to clients.
RobAtticus 13y ago
This seems overly negative, and for rather simplistic reasons. If Dart is successful internally, I'm sure they'll keep working on it. Making their developers' lives easier, and making their web properties faster/better is easily worth it for them. Also, your edit doesn't strike me as evil. It's only evil if they prevent other vendors from putting in a Dart VM. The language is opensource, and so is Chromium where their VM implementation would be, so that seems unlikely. They'd have to put in quirks that make it "work best" on Chrome that they somehow hide from the competition. I mean, was SPDY an evil move? It was originally baked into Chrome but the spec and implementation were open. It just took Firefox and others longer to decide to add support.
- pcwalton 13y ago
  The DOM memory model that all browsers use is incompatible with Dart (or any "second language" for the Web). That includes Chrome, by the way: that's why they need the Oilpan project which completely rewrites DOM memory management from scratch. In practice this is going to be a blocker for other engines to "just adopt" the Dart VM. (These concerns were raised, and ignored, on webkit-dev when Google first proposed Dart support.)
  - magicalist 13y ago
    This seems like a weirdly combative comment. This certainly isn't the primary technical (or emotional) argument against Dart. To translate for others: browsers tied the DOM memory model tightly to the single Javascript VM because it was a lot easier that way, and expanding support to multiple VMs will take a lot of work. This is one reason why you don't see many browser forks running with the "let's just add python to browsers" idea that so many have had. It's also why we still have no canvas or WebGL in web workers: no one has a DOM that sufficiently supports multi-threaded access. I have no idea what "ignored" means in this context, since Dart bindings obviously weren't added to webkit, and Oilpan is replacing the GC model for the DOM in blink. That might make it easier to support Dart (that's still only something I've read here on HN, but I don't follow Dart lists), but it's a performance improvement that has long been needed. Try tracing garbage collection in Chrome sometime in an app that manipulates the DOM; the typical pause will spend most of its time trying to collect memory on the DOM side, not the Javascript side, even for some of the simplest DOM manipulations. My understanding is that (somewhat humorously, in the context of the above) this is because of the more inefficient bindings created to allow V8 to work with Webkit, where it used to be that only JavaScriptCore bindings were needed.
ericssmith 13y ago
"Google can artificially increase traction of Dart by putting the Dart runtime inside Chrome and using that as a weapon to increase Chrome adoption" Chrome itself gained in traction because V8 was faster for a while. Putting Dart VM in Chrome and getting another competitive leap seems like a no-brainer. Not sure how that is evil or going against the spirit of the web. It's a one-liner to have it use the Javascript version, making it available in other browsers. It's not like ActiveX, as far as I can see. In practice, Dart is a decent enough compile-to-Javascript alternative with a low barrier to entry. And it works as advertised. Easy to learn, use, and debug. And the claims about structure are true. As far as I can tell, the lack of conviction is as much about seeing where developers are headed as anything. Why spend a lot if there won't be adoption. It's a tough call for Google in a pretty crowded and evolving space (ie, compiling to Javascript). I should add tha NaCl and LLVM complicate the vision of the future for web technologies as well. Hard to place a bet at the moment.
- kevingadd 13y ago
  Given the presence of modern technology like Emscripten, it would be a 'one-liner' to load a compiled-to-JS equivalent of any native ActiveX plugin (assuming it does only things the browser can do; same goes for Dart - Dart2JS is not going to be able to implement SIMD or threads or anything else that the native Dart runtime adds). It's against the spirit of the web because: 1. Dart is controlled by a single player 2. Dart was implemented by a single player 3. Dart was designed for the needs of a single player 4. Dart was designed in secret before being released to the world Those four factors combined make it seem evil even if it's not, and definitely contributed to the negative reaction it got from WebKit. If using Dart means relying on Dart2JS (which it does, because Google completely failed to get any other browser vendors to consider adopting it so far), then Dart is now just another competitor to things like GWT, Emscripten, TypeScript, etc. Dart2JS at least delivers reasonable performance thus far but it's hardly a compelling option compared to actually writing the language that runs in the browser, especially given that it has an entirely new home-grown set of libraries that aren't mature yet. If Dart is still alive 5 years from now, however, a lot of these factors could change. If it manages to prove itself somehow, maybe a Dart VM would get into WebKit or Gecko (seems unlikely due to implementation hurdles though), and the libraries will absolutely be mature by then.
lucisferre 13y ago
> Just to add, Google can artificially increase traction of Dart by putting the Dart runtime inside Chrome and using that as a weapon to increase Chrome adoption, similar to Microsoft's ActiveX strategy. If Google does this it would be a pretty evil thing to do and go against the spirit of the web. This is entirely hyperbolic. ActiveX was an entirely closed source system including the browser it ran on. Not true for Dart or Chrome. In fact you can already get Dartium (http://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and-running/contents/ch04-tools-dartium.html http://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and-running/contents/ch...). These scenarios are not even remotely similar.
- kevingadd 13y ago
  So far the response to the suggestion of adding a native Dart runtime to anything other than Chromium proper has been extremely negative. WebKit didn't want it, Mozilla doesn't seem to want it. Maybe Opera will include it since they're using Blink? It may not be a Microsoft feature but it's basically being treated the same as one. Native Client is getting similar treatment.
  - spankalee 13y ago
    The point is that Dart will run on all browsers. ActiveX only ran on IE. Dart's also friendly with the web. It has a full DOM API and JS-interop. It's not a plugin.
    - kevingadd 13y ago
      Dart2JS will run on all browsers. Dart currently will only run in Chrome. This is an important distinction.
      - mythz 13y ago
        Dart currently only runs in Dartium, There is no DartVM in Chrome which just runs the Dart2JS version live every other browser. Also I don't think it's clear whether or not Opera will include a DartVM by virtue of Blink.
gwern 13y ago
> Why would Google drop Dart? Google is almost guaranteed to drop any project that does not have high traction and/or high income within a few years of release. Dart has neither income nor traction. If Google does not drop it, I will be very surprised and impressed. Likewise. As it happens, my model's* 5-year survival prediction (=Dart being supported by Google in ~March 2018) is just 21%. I can't say I really disagree. * http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns
- hughw 13y ago
  That's a great piece of work there, gwern.
  - gwern 13y ago
    Thanks.
mythz 13y ago
Dart is a solution for building and maintaining complex web apps. Googles JS web apps has 100's of engineers working on it spanning millions LOC. Google doesn't think it's possible to develop at this scale with vanilla JS which is why they've invested a ton of effort in developing the Closure Compiler/Library and GWT (i.e. what their big JS Web Apps use). The problems with the previous strategies is that they add boilerplate, artefacts and complexity on top of JS that slows down their build times to the point where some devs have to wait 24mins to see a live/edit reload cycle. Dart was built from the ground-up to manage complexity and to provide a consistent development experience with the goal of providing the fastest edit/reload dev cycles possible. As it's also built with the input of the VM engineers who helped create StrongTalk, Hotspot JVM, V8 VMs they are able to add features that enable a high-performance VM implementation and enable features like 'Snapshots' to provide instant start up times. Google will never drop support for their 2 crown jewels, Chrome or Android. When Dart gets into Chrome and some of their big internet properties start to depend on it, you can pretty much guarantee that they'll never drop support for it. One of the mandates Google has is to improve the web, make it faster and make it possible for everyone to build richer more interactive web experiences so more people use and spend more time on the Internet. More time on the Internet means more time on Google, so developing and investing in technologies like Dart indirectly benefits them. It's also why any investments on improving the Internet remain supported, free and Open Source e.g WebP/M, SPDY, Chromium/Blink, V8, Closure Library, GWT, mod_pagespeed, Polymer and now Dart. People like to confuse Google's dropping of support for their products where everything they create is fair game and can be dropped at anytime, what's not looked at, is how the product to relates to their entire ecosystem, whether it adds value and is in a growing technology/market.
spankalee 13y ago
Standard disclaimer, I work on Dart. And normally I'd avoid engaging a borderline troll, but this is such a terrible comment, in so many ways, that I have to speak up. > Never rely on Google for anything First, you're expectation that Google will drop Dart is based on what exactly? A few SaaS product cancelations? The "never rely on Google" meme is getting so old, mainly because it's overly applied to Google when all SaaS providers have this issue, and it's been a known downside for years: when product support ends for an installed app, you still have the old installed app to use, when support is ended for SaaS users have a problem. I hope this can be mitigated one day, but that's a whole other topic. The differences with Google is that we have a ton of users even for our "small" products, and there's a single name to attach attention to, rather than the numerous shutdowns that have happened in other companies, or the startups that have bee bought and killed. The important bit for the discussion at hand is that Dart is not even _anything_ as a service. It's a set of installed, open source compilers and libraries. They will continue to work in the (unlikely, IMO) event that Google drops support. > This means that any developer taking over Dart would have to support the IDE, the VM, the javascript transcoder, the language, integration with new browser features, cross browser compatibility, etc. Dart's more of a collection of independent pieces. If Google ever did completely drop Dart I'm pretty sure that the parts could be maintained by the community (assuming the community hits critical mass). The dart2js compiler is the most important part and it's well structured, easy to understand code. The IDE could be abandoned in favor of plugins for WebStorm (already maintained by IDEA), Sublime, vim, etc. > Dart has neither income nor traction. Dart will never have income, that's not its purpose. Dart's purpose is to make web development easier, more productive and more scalable, and web apps themselves faster. This goal is both for internal development, for which we badly need something like Dart, and for everyone else because we want to see more and better web apps. As for traction, if Dart doesn't get any traction (after it's actually released, and had a good chance to succeed of course!), inside Google or outside, then it probably _should_ be abandoned, right? In that case, who exactly is there to care that it's not developed anymore? I've heard some people point to GWT as an example of what might happen to Dart. I don't agree, but for the sake of argument, let's look at where GWT is: 1) There's an official community maintaining GWT, 2) Google still has a team working on GWT, and large projects using it. 3) GWT will still get better as Java gets better. There are other factors that apply to GWT and it's language that don't apply to Dart. If Dart's fate was ever the same as GWT, I'd say it'd be a pretty soft landing for everyone. > Just to add, Google can artificially increase traction of Dart by putting the Dart runtime inside Chrome and using that as a weapon to increase Chrome adoption, similar to Microsoft's ActiveX strategy. This is still a ridiculous comparison. ActiveX was a plug-in architecture. Dart compiles to JavaScript. We support all "modern" browsers, IE9 and up. Look, we've made no bones about wanting to get the VM into browsers some day. And obviously, being part of the Chrome team, we'd like to see it in Chrome. Lars pointed out at Google I/O that there's work already being done to pave the way for this on the memory management side. The Dart VM does enable faster and quicker to startup applications, no doubt. But we all understand that Dart will be distributed as JavaScript for the foreseeable future, and we do considerable work to ensure that programs behave the same in dart2js and the VM, and that the JS output is very fast. The Dart and Chrome teams firmly believe that the adoption of Dart will entirely depend on it's success as a compile-to-JS language. How Dart helps developers will be its main draw, and hopefully there's organic demand for the VM as an accelerator for apps that already work well across the web. This will not be "evil" in anyway, but one of many ways that the browser vendors have pushed the web forward. There are so many examples of a vendor pushing something that's initially totally or somewhat proprietary but end up being a great thing for the web, that only comparing Dart to ActiveX is just juvenile and annoying. Consider JavaScript itself, XHR, <canvas>, CSS, SVG, WebGL, setImmediate() and so many other DOM APIs, CSS extensions like rounded corners, shadows, transforms, etc. Some of these have actually been much more backwards-incompatible than Dart which primarily _compiles_to_JS_. The FUD around Dart is just incredible. No matter though. We see the benefit every day that we luckily get to code in Dart, and so does our community. Those who wish to reap the benefits Dart can opt-in and those who don't can ignore it.
jrockway 13y ago
EDIT: Just to add, Google can artificially increase traction of Dart by putting the Dart runtime inside Chrome and using that as a weapon to increase Chrome adoption, similar to Microsoft's ActiveX strategy. If Google does this it would be a pretty evil thing to do and go against the spirit of the web. Couldn't Microsoft put Dart in IE today? This argument boils down to: "nobody should ever work on any programming language, because any company could add support for it to a web browser." It's technically true.
coldtea 13y ago
>Never rely on Google for anything - always have alternatives. In the case of Dart, the alternative is that it is open source, which means if (read: when) Google drops Dart, other developers can continue to support it. Well, if we're being pragmatic and cautious ("never rely on Google for anything"), then expecting Dart to get support post Google because "it's open source" is an even more dangerous idea. For one, all of Dart's core developers are Google employees. If Google kills it, I seriously doubt others will take their place. We have many precedents of abandoned open source projects where the community consistent 90% of some companies paid employees. And it's not like Dart has gained any traction from programers using it to get stuff done either.

andybak 13y ago

Developers. Developers. Developers... I'd love to know if there's an internal debate inside Google and if they are aware of how much recent decisions have damaged their reputation amongst a critical demographic. I could not understand the decision to drop Chrome Frame. It seemed like a good strategic product but even more so - a lot of people had staked their reputation on a technology choice because of it's existence. These people were the thin end of a wedge inside enterprise cultures that were historically dominated by Microsoft evangelists. Google has now pissed off these people and made them look bad.

alperakgun 13y ago
for example i need a charting solution, and google charts seem good enough.. but now would they abandon it?... all google bets are risky...
- kyrra 13y ago
  That could be said for any service you pay for. Large companies will close down projects that aren't doing well. Small companies can close their doors when they run out of money.
iopq 13y ago
After they had enough market share with Chrome they just figured they could force people to install Chrome.
- andybak 13y ago
  They could believe that about consumers but if I find it hard to believe they were naive enough to think this would work in large organizations. So what were they thinking? Is the number of large organizations stuck on old IE (<=8) not important enough to Google? Or - more worryingly - did they not think it through properly? I just don't see how that decision got made. Even freezing/slowing development on Chrome Frame would have been bearable - but dropping it?
  - 13y ago

iopq 13y ago

> Still forced to support IE 7/8 I want people who use this shit to die already.

ams6110 13y ago

I hope Google will provide some iron clad guarantees that their Dart project will be around for the next 5 years 5 years is a lifetime in web technology. 5 years ago nobody was using coffeescript, angular, ember, or any of that. They didn't exist, or if they did they were crude ancestors of what they are today. I just don't think you can have this expectation of any guarantees like that in web development. Things move too fast. If you want that kind of guarantee, use open source stuff and acknowledge that you'll have to support it yourself when the rest of the world moves on.

kintamanimatt 13y ago
Here's my problem with this line of thinking: Dart is supposed to replace one third of the triad of core technologies web developers use: HTML, JS, and CSS. It doesn't appear that in the long term it's intended to be transcompiled to JavaScript. CoffeeScript is only intended to be an alternative that transcompiles to JS. There's no effort to build a CoffeeScript VM. (C8? CoffeeMonkey?) Angular, Ember, etc are just frameworks. They're not likely to be as long-lived as the triad of front-end web development technologies because the creation of such a framework has a significantly lower barrier to entry and adoption. There's no W3C committee overseeing development and there will be no W3C draft or standard for any of these somewhat ephemeral frameworks. Core web development technologies are very stable and their development, deployment, and adoption happens quite slowly; on the order of decades. If Dart does become widely adopted (and with the support of browser markers) it'll likely remain in place for a long, long time, far longer than the latest JavaScript framework or veneer language de jure. Even if Dart does become widely adopted, Dart hasn't got a hope of truly replacing JavaScript, at least for the foreseeable future (>10 years), as both a Dart VM and a JS VM would have to coexist in all browsers for reasons of backward compatibility. Yay, browser codebase bloat!

andyl 13y ago

Dart is part of Google's strategy to replace open-standards with its own proprietary walled-garden. Let's hope it doesn't work. Stay away from Dart.

cromwellian 13y ago
Stay away from Kool Aid. ;-) Really, this is unfounded and unjustified speculation.
- andybak 13y ago
  As silly as the preceding comment was. it's becoming common to hear similar sentiments and it just shows that Google has a severe PR problem amongst it's people who would previously have sung it's praises.
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    The PR problems come with success and size. It's impossible for any large organization, no matter how "non-evil" to avoid criticism and conspiracies. Google has done better than most in still maintaining good will, but obviously PRISM isn't helping, and Microsoft and Apple communities are both pushing the privacy angle. (If you really think these concerns are totally organically driven, I encourage you to look at complaints about 'google tracking you' before/after Android was launched, or follow the trail of Microsoft shell organizations and their whisper campaigns) Google commands tremendous marketshare with Chrome now, and so people are going to be hyper-sensitive about anything it does. But I would read PPK on Blink for example (http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2013/04/blink.html http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2013/04/blink.html) to see how Google is treating the Web. Honestly, the Web has been driven forward tremendously in the last few years with HTML5, CSS3, WebRTC, etc but Javascript hasn't budged much, although performance has increased, the warts of the language have not been fixed, and TC39 is taking too long. That's why you're seeing everyone create languages that compile down to JS. My biggest concerns are that if the problems of the Web platform aren't fixed, especially for mobile, a whole generation of people will be raised on native apps, and the most amazing platform for distribution of federated, transparent information in human history will lose. Simply put, the Web is more important than Javascript.

INTPenis 13y ago

Before Google Reader was cancelled I don't remember people worrying this much online about each new Google service and its longevity. Seems like a non-issue to me. When we run out of real criticism against Google we just make some up because they're big and.. you know.. playa hatin'. ;) Try to remember that it's first and foremost a search engine with ad-revenue. Anything else is a product of a liberal work environment and driven employees.

smacktoward 13y ago
> Try to remember that it's first and foremost a search engine with ad-revenue. Anything else is a product of a liberal work environment and driven employees. But that's actually a really good reason to hesitate a bit before betting your own project's success on anything they put out that isn't directly related to the search engine or the ad products. It's not "playa hatin'" to recognize that things from Google that aren't strategic to them may get dropped some day, it's just being pragmatic.

cromwellian 13y ago

This article isn't about Dart, it's about IE6 and ChromeFrame. Microsoft itself is discontinuing support for IE6 next April. Period. It's dead. You're blaming Google for not supporting a dead platform that not even Microsoft is going to support any longer. It's time to upgrade your internal systems. Don't blame Google for not wasting resources on a shitty broken browser that causes developers to waste time supporting. IE6 needs to die, die, die.

andybak 13y ago
Chrome Frame is also useful for later IE versions. IE8 is becoming the thorn that IE6 once was.

mark_l_watson 13y ago

I was playing with Dart and found it really nice for both server and client side development. However, I ended up setting Dart aside (as I did for ClojureScript) and worked on my JavaScript skills.

spankalee 13y ago
I hope you check it out again as we reach 1.0. We're going to be able to give server-side some more attention after 1.0 too.

cmccabe 13y ago

Google didn't have a choice about Chrome Frame. The new Internet Explorer 10 doesn't support plugins that are as invasive as Chrome Frame. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh968248%28v=vs.85%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh968248%28v=vs.8... Chrome Frame on older Internet Explorer versions shouldn't really need to be updated that much, since those browsers aren't changing that much. Also, I find it really hard to believe that the kind of IT department that decrees that everyone has to use IE6 (or whatever) would ever allow such an invasive third-party plugin as Chrome Frame in the first place. The limited browser compatibility of dart.js is a real issue and probably is a dealbreaker for some enterprise situations. But there's no need to bring Google Reader into this-- it has literally nothing to do with it. The other thing which everyone seems to be missing here is that even if Google does "become bored with Dart," there will still be an open source community to support it. Coffeescript has been around forever without any sugar daddy. A big part of the reason for using open source technologies is to avoid vendor lock-in and other similar questions about the future.

lucisferre 13y ago
The argument some have made is the supporting Dart is much more complex than supporting Coffeescript and it will be hard for an entirely ragtag open source community effort to back it up without serious corporate involvement from one or more sources. I'd be much more likely to buy into Dart (and I really do want to) if Google could reach out and partner with others (say Mozilla) so Dart support doesn't have a single point of failure.
bradleyjg 13y ago
It is very difficult to move a non-trivial product from corporate developed with source code available to community developed even if both are technically open source. If things like design docs & decisions, the main bug tracker, commit rights, and so on are all internal you end up with no one with the institutional knowledge to take over if the company decides to drop it. The most famous example of this is probably the open sourcing of Netscape Navigator which lead to a four year gap before the next release, due to a ground up rewrite.

_random_ 13y ago

It is loosing to TypeScript already.

adrianlmm 13y ago

Greetings, I'm someone who is using Dart in production I can tell you that is promising and the community is growing. The only problem I see is that Dart developers are focusing to much in the newer stuff w/o ironing the basics first, for example, the DateTime datatype can't parse this: "2013-08-03 12:00" but can parse this: "20130742", and to me is more important to work in those basics than all the fancy Canvas stuff or polymer. We don't know the level of compromise Google has with Dart, I'm taking the risk cause I think is worth it.

PommeDeTerre 13y ago
It's somewhat disconcerting for Dart to merely be seen as "promising", especially given its competition. It would take a lot of effort to do worse than JavaScript. CoffeeScript is basically just JavaScript with a Ruby-inspired syntax. TypeScript is only a very minimal set of improvements to JavaScript. If it's doing things right, it should be blowing all three of those away with ease, especially given its origin. The fact that its uptake is so slow suggests that it isn't competing against them very well, which I take to be a bad sign going forward.
- adrianlmm 13y ago
  To make this clear, when I say "Promising" I don't mean it as something vague, Dart is in beta now and it will hit the 1.0 status this year, so start using it and learning it today ain't that crazy.
- spankalee 13y ago
  Dart's uptake is slow because it hasn't really been released yet. It's pre-1.0 and has been evolving pretty rapidly until recently. I'm not worried.
sethladd 13y ago
Did you file a bug for the date parsing? Thanks for using Dart!

michaelwww 13y ago

> How serious is Google about Dart? It depends. I spent a lot of time looking at Dart in the first part of this year. My impression is that the team developing Dart is very serious and enthusiastic about it. Dart makes web development fun again. It's easy to try things and throw them away if you get a better idea in the process. Building large apps is easy. The success of Dart doesn't only depend on success in the browser, because a lot of effort is being put into Dart on the server, where it hopes to compete with Nodejs and replace Java for some uses. Another motivation for Dart is that it is not influenced in any way by Oracle, who has sued Google over Java. Dart may shine on mobile devices where old browsers are not an issue, that remains to be seen. Who is not enthusiastic about Dart at Google? I would say the Chrome team and the Closure team, based on a lot of reading and watching videos, are not enthusiastic. This is just my impression. I have no inside information. As far as I know, Dart is not being used internally. The Chrome Frame issue caused me to switch to TypeScript, which I also really like. It's not as much fun as Dart, but it certainly makes JavaScript a lot more verifiably correct, with type annotations making code refactoring and type checking possible. TypeScript is an ok alternative to Dart. They feel similar, they each have their uses. I wouldn't bet the company on Dart, but I would on TypeScript, which could go away and you'd still have perfectly readable and sensible JavaScript files to work with. As Anders Hejlsberg (designer of C# and TypeScript) says, "we don't obfuscate your code." It's easy enough to learn Dart. There are places even now where it makes sense to use Dart. If JavaScript is an old internal combustion engine car, then TypeScript is one with automatic transmission and power steering, while Dart is a new electric car. I'll drive all three as long as they get me where I'm going.

spankalee 13y ago
FYI, Dart is starting to be used internally, on multiple projects, and some pretty large ones. And Dart's part of the Chrome team, if Chrome wasn't enthusiastic about Dart, Dart wouldn't exist.
- michaelwww 13y ago
  I get my impression from this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlJob8K_OwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlJob8K_OwE Skip to &t=17m26s and you can hear them talk about it. Judge for yourself.

slm_HN 13y ago

Didn't Larry Page say "we're putting more wood behind fewer darts" when he took over?

packetslave 13y ago
fewer arrows

jdonaldson 13y ago

FWIW, Haxe is a solid alternative if you're looking into alt-js or cross platform (mobile) development: http://haxe.org/ http://haxe.org/ It doesn't have the money of Google, but it has been around for 8 years, and is backed by its own non-profit foundation. It just recently hit version 3.0: http://haxe.org/manual/haxe3/features http://haxe.org/manual/haxe3/features It continues to make steps forward with new cross-platform development frameworks like openfl. http://www.openfl.org/ http://www.openfl.org/

eliben 13y ago

I am puzzled by low-quality, hyperbolic, panicky articles like this. And I'm even more surprised by the reaction they cause on HN. http://blog.chromium.org/2013/06/retiring-chrome-frame.html http://blog.chromium.org/2013/06/retiring-chrome-frame.html seems like a pretty good reasoning w.r.t stopping updating Chrome Frame and lists alternatives. What's all this noise about? And what the hell does this have to do with Dart?

hatsix 13y ago
Yakov Fain is a world-class whiner and master of hyperbole. He was always the "squeaky wheel" in the Flash/Flex community, and it doesn't surprise me that he's still whining. Why it's being picked up by HN is beyond me... maybe because Google is the favorite scapegoat recently? Certainly few people bothered reading what he wrote and just started commenting/complaining. It's astonishing to me that Google is getting flak for dropping (in 5 months) what amounts to a 3rd-party-patch for a browser that'll be turning 5 years old. They already dropped support for IE8 in Google Apps, and jQuery dropped support several months ago. If Fain wants to play with fancy new technologies, he should find clients who want to use new technologies.

coldtea 13y ago

>During the meeting one person said that about 15% of our users are still working with older browsers and we don’t want to lose them if Dart-generated JavaScript won’t work in Internet Explorer 7 or 8. I immediately answered that this wouldn’t be an issue, because several years ago Google created a smart way to automatically download Chrome’s JavaScript VM if the application runs inside IE. The name of this smart solution is Google Frame. Err, Google Frame is not a "solution" for Dart not running on older IE browsers and it doesn't just download "Chrome's Javascript VM". It's (was) a way to install a different web engine for IE altogether, based on Chrome. Second, it's not "automatically downloading" (which might give the impression that it's transparent to the user) -- you have to install it.