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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.
    - cromwellian 13y ago
      No, 90% of the work consists of compiler engineering efforts to significantly refactor the compiler, improve performance, and radically improve interoperability with JS. It's taking a long time and we are more concerned with the future, and not just maintaining IE6 support which significantly harmed the design of several APIs.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  GWT did not get dropped by Google, in fact, the team supporting it is larger than it has been in recent memory.
pekk 13y ago
Does Google really use Go very much, though? I gather that the amount of Go software used at Google is dwarfed by other languages, it's just that nobody feels like writing a million articles about how awesome it is that Google uses Java.
- pron 13y ago
  I've heard (from a friend working at Google) that Go is actually used a little bit inside Google. Obviously not as much as Java, or even C++ and Python. If Go survives I figure it would probably be used outside Google more than inside. After all, it's basically Java optimized for shorter time-to-first-demo, so it's best suited for small projects. Then again, programming languages rarely rise or fall based on merit; most times it's a matter of politics, hype or coincidence. The same will probably be true for Go and Dart.
- packetslave 13y ago
  The amount of Go software used at Google is dwarfed by other languages because those languages (C++, Java, and Python) have been in use for 10-15 years. Go is definitely picking up steam, and there have been a couple of fairly high-profile projects talked about publicly (the dl.google.com rewrite from bradfitz and YouTube's MySQL proxy)
- skybrian 13y ago
  The adoption curve is up and to the right, from a small base. These things take time.
jrockway 13y ago
My team uses Dart for an internal application. We chose Dart because we wanted to be able to reuse the client code for both the web interface and for tools that call the same HTTP API as the web interface. (The server side is Python on App Engine.) We didn't quite get this "for free" as I had originally hoped, as the libraries to make HTTP calls are different between the client and the server (complicating the API is something called "HTTP over RPC" that we use for authenticated requests to servers from workstations). I also prefer class-based OO to prototype-based OO and wanted to be able to write thorough tests without requiring them to run in a browser, so Dart fit those requirements better than a Javascript-based framework. After about a year of working on this project occasionally, I've found Dart code to be much easier to read and refactor than Javascript, but it also ends up being a lot more verbose. Dart lets you encode a lot more of your intent into the program text, which I generally see as a good thing when you plan to have more than one engineer work on your code.

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.
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    No, 90% of the work consists of compiler engineering efforts to significantly refactor the compiler, improve performance, and radically improve interoperability with JS. It's taking a long time and we are more concerned with the future, and not just maintaining IE6 support which significantly harmed the design of several APIs.
cromwellian 13y ago
GWT did not get dropped by Google, in fact, the team supporting it is larger than it has been in recent memory.

pekk 13y ago

Does Google really use Go very much, though? I gather that the amount of Go software used at Google is dwarfed by other languages, it's just that nobody feels like writing a million articles about how awesome it is that Google uses Java.

pron 13y ago
I've heard (from a friend working at Google) that Go is actually used a little bit inside Google. Obviously not as much as Java, or even C++ and Python. If Go survives I figure it would probably be used outside Google more than inside. After all, it's basically Java optimized for shorter time-to-first-demo, so it's best suited for small projects. Then again, programming languages rarely rise or fall based on merit; most times it's a matter of politics, hype or coincidence. The same will probably be true for Go and Dart.
packetslave 13y ago
The amount of Go software used at Google is dwarfed by other languages because those languages (C++, Java, and Python) have been in use for 10-15 years. Go is definitely picking up steam, and there have been a couple of fairly high-profile projects talked about publicly (the dl.google.com rewrite from bradfitz and YouTube's MySQL proxy)
skybrian 13y ago
The adoption curve is up and to the right, from a small base. These things take time.

jrockway 13y ago

My team uses Dart for an internal application. We chose Dart because we wanted to be able to reuse the client code for both the web interface and for tools that call the same HTTP API as the web interface. (The server side is Python on App Engine.) We didn't quite get this "for free" as I had originally hoped, as the libraries to make HTTP calls are different between the client and the server (complicating the API is something called "HTTP over RPC" that we use for authenticated requests to servers from workstations). I also prefer class-based OO to prototype-based OO and wanted to be able to write thorough tests without requiring them to run in a browser, so Dart fit those requirements better than a Javascript-based framework. After about a year of working on this project occasionally, I've found Dart code to be much easier to read and refactor than Javascript, but it also ends up being a lot more verbose. Dart lets you encode a lot more of your intent into the program text, which I generally see as a good thing when you plan to have more than one engineer work on your code.