6 ms·
I'm using AngularJS. But this Dart news is a dark cloud. I will never use Dart, or anything that locks me into Google's walled garden. I view Dart as a major
by andyl 13y ago
I'm using AngularJS. But this Dart news is a dark cloud. I will never use Dart, or anything that locks me into Google's walled garden. I view Dart as a major negative.
Hello Ember.
- spuz 13y ago"I will never use Dart" That's quite a sure statement. Why don't you think Dart will ever be natively adopted by Firefox at some point in the future?
- Helianthus 13y agoBecause that's a pretty laughable idea. There's no reason for browsers to choose Dart over CoffeeScript or TypeScript, and Dart is so far behind CoffeeScript it's not even funny. Google wants to do it, sure, but that doesn't mean they'll succeed, even if they try something as stubborn as running Dart alongside Javascript in Chrome. There simply isn't a path to ubiquity for Dart, and if there were it's not the only language on it.
- davidstalnaker 13y agoIn what way is Dart "so far behind" CoffeeScript?
- Helianthus 13y agodeveloper mindshare. Check tag count for questions on SO; 4500 for CoffeeScript, 1500 for Dart. Not to mention the violent revulsion many people (myself included) are expressing in this topic.
- eco 13y agoThat's not a very good metric. CoffeeScript is twice the age of Dart.
- Helianthus 13y agoFair point; I was trying to get github numbers and got sidetracked.
- cromwellian 13y agoBy that metric, GWT blows away CoffeeScript with ~15,000 questions on SO. Are you sure you want to use that metric?
- Helianthus 13y agoPoint was to compare compile-to-javascript languages.
- spankalee 13y agoUh, GWT is a Java-to-JS compiler. On that note, Java has 508,338 questions on StackOverflow, which crushes CoffeeScript, /especially/ with those 15,000 GWT questions ;)
- Helianthus 13y agoOh, interesting. Is it really a standalone transpiler or is it a set of tools? As someone else pointed out, SO isn't a great metric, but finding github activity by language seemed to take more time than I was willing to invest.
- spankalee 13y agoNo metric will be great right now because Dart is so new compared to CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript 1.0 was released 3 years ago. Give us a chance to get 1.0 out the door :)
- rdtsc 13y ago> Not to mention the violent revulsion many people (myself included) are expressing in this topic. Immaturity seems like a good explanation of that effect
- Helianthus 13y agoNot your best work.
- rdtsc 13y agoI just let Occam do the dirty work for me sometimes.
- Helianthus 13y agoOh don't be so simple. :P
- spankalee 13y agoYou have it backwards. There's no reason for browsers to choose CoffeeScript or TypeScript because they do not change the semantics of JavaScript which make it hard to optimize for. There really isn't anything for a browser to adopt with one of those languages, other than a small translation to JS. Dart is fundamentally different in that it was designed for speed (as well as toolability and readability) and by directly supporting Dart a VM can make many more optimizations than a JS VM can. The Dart VM is already 1.5-2x faster than JS in some cases, while being _much_ younger.
- pjmlp 13y agoWhat do the other browser vendors gain by supporting Dart?
- edtechdev 13y agoIt doesn't matter - Dart can compile to JavaScript. When it might matter is if there are apps (like games) that run faster in a Dart VM than in javascript. Anyway though, even Chrome doesn't include a Dart VM yet by default, so no big deal yet.
- wamatt 13y agoBrendenEich said this of Dart, 2 years ago on HN, and might help explain OP's sentiment: For the record, I'm not worried about JS being replaced by a better language. I am working to do that within Ecma TC39, by evolving JS aggressively. The leaked Google doc's assertion that this is impossible and that a "clean break" is required to make significant improvements is nonsense, a thin rationale for going it alone rather than cooperating fully. The big issue I have with Dart, which you seem to consider inconsequential, is whether Google forks the web developer community, not just its own paid developers, with Dart, and thereby fragments web content. A Dart to JS compiler will never be "decent" compared to having the Dart VM in the browser. Yet I guarantee you that Apple and Microsoft (and Opera and Mozilla, but the first two are enough) will never embed the Dart VM. So "Works best in Chrome" and even "Works only in Chrome" are new norms promulgated intentionally by Google. We see more of this fragmentation every day. As a user of Chrome and Firefox (and Safari), I find it painful to experience, never mind the political bad taste. Ok, counter-arguments. What's wrong with playing hardball to advance the web, you say? As my blog tries to explain, the standards process requires good social relations and philosophical balance among the participating competitors. Google's approach with Dart is thus pretty much all wrong and doomed to leave Dart in excellent yet non-standardized and non-interoperable implementation status. Dart is GBScript to NaCl/Pepper's ActiveG. Could Google, unlike Microsoft ten or so years ago, prevail? Only by becoming the new monopoly power on the web. We know how that story ends. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2982949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2982949 EDIT: updated to the long form quote, for additional context.
- golergka 13y ago> A Dart to JS compiler will never be "decent" compared to having the Dart VM in the browser. I'm new to javascript & dart, so honest question here: why?
- k3n 13y agoBecause it is a Google project, and other browser vendors (those mentioned in Eich's next sentence) don't want to include something from a competitor into their own browser. It'd be about like Ford proposing that GM and Dodge install Ford's GPS unit (hopefully you can relate to major US automakers). He might have spoken too soon though (or I missed the point), as there are projects out now that I think could very well make a decent runtime for Dart. Using tech such as asm.js[1] -- which Firefox now includes natively (drawing a parallel to Google's Dart) -- along with new versions of JS, and modern JS browser optimizations....it can make for a very efficient script. As efficient as Dart with the VM? Probably not, but I'm not sure just how much of the market you're going to corner by such an advantage. Any JS outside of a browser will undoubtedly run on NodeJS, which is going to be more efficient than Dart for most (if not all) tasks, and so it just comes to down to in-browser usage. For 99.99% of current web apps, I don't think you'd never notice a difference. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js
- rdtsc 13y agoA developer who is seeing "dark clouds" and other doomsday scenarios at release of a nice open sourced package not using or participating in a community is an asset to that community.
- dchest 13y agoHello overreaction.
- eknkc 13y agoEmber is a "no" for me beacuse of explicit getters and setters. Angular's Object.observe like digest mechanism is superior.
- lennel 13y agoobserve is so slow however, not matter which way you do it.
- YorickPeterse 13y agoYou do realize who made/maintains Angular right?
- desireco42 13y agoSeriously, if you like and use AngularJS and based on something tangential like this Dart announcement, you decide to switch to Ember, which honestly is not that similar. Like someone said, you/we can always decide to fork project, but again... let people who care about Dart try to do it, I think this is legitimate prof of concept. I don't think it will catch up, if there is genuine work outside Google on Angular. I am grateful for good work done on Angular project and look forward for new features. I will not use Dart that is for sure.
- eliben 13y agoWhat walled garden, could you elaborate? Dart is an open-source project and compiles to JS. Not unlike CoffeeScript or TypeScript. The cool thing that makes me excited about dart2js is that Dart is a much better language than JS itself (not a high bar, but still) and that dart2js as of late is producing more efficient code than hand-coded JS because they leverage Dart's more ubiquitous typing as well as other tricks.
- bigonlogn 13y agoThis is the nature of using any third party software or API. If you're not going to write it yourself, then you have to be willing to play by someone else's rules. Words I learned to live by years ago. Coincidentally, this is how I feel about AngularJS. By using it, you're developing apps the way Google wants you (or it's own developers) to. It could be good, it could be bad. it depends on the app, but you still have to do it their way. You don't want to be locked into Google's walled garden, but, by using Angular, you're already inside...