7 ms·

This has sadly the potential of making Chrome second coming of IE6, with enterprises locked in a system that is too successful to have the incentive to evolve.

This has sadly the potential of making Chrome second coming of IE6, with enterprises locked in a system that is too successful to have the incentive to evolve. As long as the Dart specification is not governed gy a body encompassing all major browser vendors, this is a very dangerous development (And yes, I know that being governed by a standards body seriously hampers the evolution of a standard, but everything is a tradeoff...)

mythz 13y ago
Such uninformed comparisons are getting extremely tiresome and I consider to be the enemy of progress. There is nothing more that the Dart Team can do to make it anymore open - they're doing as much as is possible. This is nothing like IE, which is actually proprietary and closed-source. In contrast, there is absolutely nothing about Dart that's proprietary. Dart is 100% open source, including patents grants, it's completely developed in the open and for the last 2 years has seen steadily progress with feedback from the public mailing list. It's actually a goal for the project that everyone is able to freely use Dart in any capacity. Lars Bak already said that after 1.0 is shipped they're going to work on getting the language standardized. There is nothing legal or technical stopping other browser vendors using Dart, any hesitations are 100% political. Dart is finally the first real alternative where we may be able to progress beyond JavaScript, that as a core objective also compiles to first-class JavaScript, i.e. many features dismissed because it couldn't be efficiently transpiled to JS. I care about progress, the current state of web development is fragmented and broken, we need to be encouraging more initiatives like Dart that challenges the status-quo and is able to progress past the fragmented inconsistent mess we have to deal with now in trying to develop complex, rich, high-performance web apps.
- DoubleMalt 13y ago
  The problem is that even if Dart is completely open and patent free (and I agree that there is a vast difference between Dart and ActiveX in this regard), if the other browser vendors like Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla don't pick it up, it will still be a walled garden, even if the wall is built by the others. Also Google has shown signs of embrace, extend extinguish when it comes to essential parts of Android, which makes me a bit wary. I would love nothing more that Dart superseding JS as the goto language (and compile target) for browser development, as it is doubtless a step forward. But there are pitalls hidden on the way there and the outcome is determined by the path we will take. Of course hesitations are political, because the outcome will be determined by political actions of everybody involved, Google, MS, Apple and Mozilla. Technical merits alone don't guarantee a happy outcome, sadly.
  - mythz 13y ago
    Agreed, although it's not a walled garden when others are artificially putting up the wall, since they continue to enjoy the complete freedom if they ever want to take it down. Luckily unlike other walled gardens, the quality of Dart2JS, i.e. first-class source-maps support and many benchmarks showing it even outperforms hand-crafted JS, ensures that Dart apps will continue to benefit and run in other modern browsers even without their support, where the only difference will be the start-up and runtime performance of the running code, so we end up getting it back down to technical merits.
    - threeseed 13y ago
      How are Mozilla and Apple putting up a wall ? Dart maybe open source but it still a proprietary, non-standard solution where ALL the committers work for Google. https://code.google.com/p/dart/people/list https://code.google.com/p/dart/people/list
      - mythz 13y ago
        Please re-read the parent, I've replied saying it's not a walled garden when others are choosing not to adopt it. > Dart maybe open source but it still a proprietary, non-standard solution You use the word 'proprietary' but I don't think it means what you think it means. It doesn't mean you have complete access to the entire source code implementation and freedom to use all of it or any of it, in anyway you see fit. It doesn't describe a project that's driven by feedback in a public mailing list, that welcomes external feedback and contributions, and it's rarely used to describe a project with a core goal for it to have no-legal-or-technical-barrier, free access, encouraging its wide-spread adoption. By your definition most Open source projects are proprietary and non-standard, where most programming languages aren't even standardized, the difference with Dart is that it actually has the commercial backing that can justify the effort in actually getting it standardized, which it plans to do now that Dart 1.0 is shipped, just as Lars Bak announced at Google IO. Again like many OSS projects, the Dart project has taken external contributions, but the brilliant minds that Google have brought in to work on Dart full-time are indeed being paid to do so. It's not uncommon, to accept Q/A verified external contributions but to ensure only employees have free reign and project-wide commit access. Even Dart's internal contributions still have to go through a Q/A code-review process.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- pacala 13y ago
  Dart is quite awesome on technical grounds. One thing though. I'm not entirely sure how it combats fragmentation. For example, I also find TypeScript awesome. ECMA6 fixes most of the blind spots of JS and it's quite palatable. Heck, even Java 8 is getting in the same general sweet spot. In another neck of the woods we have iOS. So now there are 4-5 solid platforms (language + libs) with sizable corporate support to develop Web / mobile apps. Oh, and there is also pNaCl (technically awesome as well), which raises fragmentation by an order of magnitude. I find the situation bewildering. Coding in all these languages and platforms is pretty much the same, with minor syntactic variations.
  - mythz 13y ago
    Dart provides a standard way to do inheritance which means that all libraries and frameworks will be able to inherit from each other. Web Components and polymer is a good example of the power and re-use enabled by encapsulation. The http://www.polymer-project.org http://www.polymer-project.org goal is that you can integrate and re-use Dart web components, Angular JS components, Firefox x-tags, etc within the same web app. Which is unprecedented in the fragmented world of JS.
ahoge 13y ago
> enterprises locked in a system Why would anyone do that? We have a super nice solution for that. It's called "site-specific browser" or SSB. It's like a browser without address bar, which automatically opens a specific URL on start up. You can have one per intra-/extranet application and you can update them individually on a as-needed basis. You get all of the benefits of a fixed platform without any of the downsides. Well, you'll need a little bit more RAM and and a little bit more HDD space, but that really shouldn't be an issue.
Xelom 13y ago
It is not the same I guess. Since there is dart2js, I think we can force a Dart application to run on DartVM when the browser is Chrome and run as js when it is not Chrome. I might be mistaken. You'll just see performance gain, the application is the same.
- threeseed 13y ago
  Dart has all the perils of an embrace and extinguish situation even if it is not the intention. Developers commit to Dart only to find in the future that the DartVM/Dart2JS targets have differing behaviour or levels of attention. And then suddenly Dart apps require Chrome and we end up with same IE6 mess again. These situations can sometimes happen by accident or for technical reasons. And for me the web is far too important to take the risk.
  - munificent 13y ago
    Hi, I'm on the Dart team. > Dart has all the perils of an embrace and extinguish situation even if it is not the intention. I'm not sure what you mean by "perils" here, but if it's just "by deciding to use a product, you could end up following it in a bad direction if they do that", I'm not sure how that's different from any other product. Any technology can go in unpredicted directions. > Developers commit to Dart only to find in the future that the DartVM/Dart2JS targets have differing behavior or levels of attention. Historically, the dart2js team has had as many or more resources than the VM team. If you consider the past a predictor of the future, then this shouldn't be a concern. > And then suddenly Dart apps require Chrome and we end up with same IE6 mess again. That would be pretty crazy of us, though, right? We want our language to be successful. Intentionally making it only work on a minority of browsers (and the unbelievably massive negative political repercussions of doing that) wouldn't exactly do much for Dart's adoption. I'm trying to imagine some nefarious scenario where that could happen, and I'm having trouble conjuring one up. Evil Chrome exec: Well done, minion! Dart is successful and has lots of users! Now is our chance to attack! Evil Dart exec: What have you in mind, O Master? Evil Chrome exec: Now we'll add a feature to Dart that only the VM supports. Users will have to use Chrome in order to run apps that use that feature! Mua-hahahaha! Evil Dart exec: But master, why would a developer use that feature if they know it will prevent millions of users from running their app? Evil Chrome exec: Uh... it will be such a delightful feature they won't be able to resist. Like... I don't know, currying or something. Evil Dart exec: But what happens if someone just sends us a patch to implement it dart2js too? Evil Chrome exec: Well, don't land it, obviously! Evil Dart exec: What should we say in the code review? Evil Chrome exec: Why do you bother me with these details? Just move ahead with our plan! Evil Dart exec: Remind me again what our plan is master? Evil Chrome exec: To force the world to use Chrome! Soon, we will be as successful as IE6 was! Evil Dart exec: Not to question your wisdom, master, but IE is no longer the dominant browser, so that didn't work out well for them, did it? Also, developers now universally revile IE because of their practices. We'd be shunned if we did something like that.

mythz 13y ago

Such uninformed comparisons are getting extremely tiresome and I consider to be the enemy of progress. There is nothing more that the Dart Team can do to make it anymore open - they're doing as much as is possible. This is nothing like IE, which is actually proprietary and closed-source. In contrast, there is absolutely nothing about Dart that's proprietary. Dart is 100% open source, including patents grants, it's completely developed in the open and for the last 2 years has seen steadily progress with feedback from the public mailing list. It's actually a goal for the project that everyone is able to freely use Dart in any capacity. Lars Bak already said that after 1.0 is shipped they're going to work on getting the language standardized. There is nothing legal or technical stopping other browser vendors using Dart, any hesitations are 100% political. Dart is finally the first real alternative where we may be able to progress beyond JavaScript, that as a core objective also compiles to first-class JavaScript, i.e. many features dismissed because it couldn't be efficiently transpiled to JS. I care about progress, the current state of web development is fragmented and broken, we need to be encouraging more initiatives like Dart that challenges the status-quo and is able to progress past the fragmented inconsistent mess we have to deal with now in trying to develop complex, rich, high-performance web apps.

DoubleMalt 13y ago
The problem is that even if Dart is completely open and patent free (and I agree that there is a vast difference between Dart and ActiveX in this regard), if the other browser vendors like Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla don't pick it up, it will still be a walled garden, even if the wall is built by the others. Also Google has shown signs of embrace, extend extinguish when it comes to essential parts of Android, which makes me a bit wary. I would love nothing more that Dart superseding JS as the goto language (and compile target) for browser development, as it is doubtless a step forward. But there are pitalls hidden on the way there and the outcome is determined by the path we will take. Of course hesitations are political, because the outcome will be determined by political actions of everybody involved, Google, MS, Apple and Mozilla. Technical merits alone don't guarantee a happy outcome, sadly.
- mythz 13y ago
  Agreed, although it's not a walled garden when others are artificially putting up the wall, since they continue to enjoy the complete freedom if they ever want to take it down. Luckily unlike other walled gardens, the quality of Dart2JS, i.e. first-class source-maps support and many benchmarks showing it even outperforms hand-crafted JS, ensures that Dart apps will continue to benefit and run in other modern browsers even without their support, where the only difference will be the start-up and runtime performance of the running code, so we end up getting it back down to technical merits.
  - threeseed 13y ago
    How are Mozilla and Apple putting up a wall ? Dart maybe open source but it still a proprietary, non-standard solution where ALL the committers work for Google. https://code.google.com/p/dart/people/list https://code.google.com/p/dart/people/list
    - mythz 13y ago
      Please re-read the parent, I've replied saying it's not a walled garden when others are choosing not to adopt it. > Dart maybe open source but it still a proprietary, non-standard solution You use the word 'proprietary' but I don't think it means what you think it means. It doesn't mean you have complete access to the entire source code implementation and freedom to use all of it or any of it, in anyway you see fit. It doesn't describe a project that's driven by feedback in a public mailing list, that welcomes external feedback and contributions, and it's rarely used to describe a project with a core goal for it to have no-legal-or-technical-barrier, free access, encouraging its wide-spread adoption. By your definition most Open source projects are proprietary and non-standard, where most programming languages aren't even standardized, the difference with Dart is that it actually has the commercial backing that can justify the effort in actually getting it standardized, which it plans to do now that Dart 1.0 is shipped, just as Lars Bak announced at Google IO. Again like many OSS projects, the Dart project has taken external contributions, but the brilliant minds that Google have brought in to work on Dart full-time are indeed being paid to do so. It's not uncommon, to accept Q/A verified external contributions but to ensure only employees have free reign and project-wide commit access. Even Dart's internal contributions still have to go through a Q/A code-review process.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pacala 13y ago
Dart is quite awesome on technical grounds. One thing though. I'm not entirely sure how it combats fragmentation. For example, I also find TypeScript awesome. ECMA6 fixes most of the blind spots of JS and it's quite palatable. Heck, even Java 8 is getting in the same general sweet spot. In another neck of the woods we have iOS. So now there are 4-5 solid platforms (language + libs) with sizable corporate support to develop Web / mobile apps. Oh, and there is also pNaCl (technically awesome as well), which raises fragmentation by an order of magnitude. I find the situation bewildering. Coding in all these languages and platforms is pretty much the same, with minor syntactic variations.
- mythz 13y ago
  Dart provides a standard way to do inheritance which means that all libraries and frameworks will be able to inherit from each other. Web Components and polymer is a good example of the power and re-use enabled by encapsulation. The http://www.polymer-project.org http://www.polymer-project.org goal is that you can integrate and re-use Dart web components, Angular JS components, Firefox x-tags, etc within the same web app. Which is unprecedented in the fragmented world of JS.

ahoge 13y ago

> enterprises locked in a system Why would anyone do that? We have a super nice solution for that. It's called "site-specific browser" or SSB. It's like a browser without address bar, which automatically opens a specific URL on start up. You can have one per intra-/extranet application and you can update them individually on a as-needed basis. You get all of the benefits of a fixed platform without any of the downsides. Well, you'll need a little bit more RAM and and a little bit more HDD space, but that really shouldn't be an issue.

Xelom 13y ago

It is not the same I guess. Since there is dart2js, I think we can force a Dart application to run on DartVM when the browser is Chrome and run as js when it is not Chrome. I might be mistaken. You'll just see performance gain, the application is the same.

threeseed 13y ago
Dart has all the perils of an embrace and extinguish situation even if it is not the intention. Developers commit to Dart only to find in the future that the DartVM/Dart2JS targets have differing behaviour or levels of attention. And then suddenly Dart apps require Chrome and we end up with same IE6 mess again. These situations can sometimes happen by accident or for technical reasons. And for me the web is far too important to take the risk.
- munificent 13y ago
  Hi, I'm on the Dart team. > Dart has all the perils of an embrace and extinguish situation even if it is not the intention. I'm not sure what you mean by "perils" here, but if it's just "by deciding to use a product, you could end up following it in a bad direction if they do that", I'm not sure how that's different from any other product. Any technology can go in unpredicted directions. > Developers commit to Dart only to find in the future that the DartVM/Dart2JS targets have differing behavior or levels of attention. Historically, the dart2js team has had as many or more resources than the VM team. If you consider the past a predictor of the future, then this shouldn't be a concern. > And then suddenly Dart apps require Chrome and we end up with same IE6 mess again. That would be pretty crazy of us, though, right? We want our language to be successful. Intentionally making it only work on a minority of browsers (and the unbelievably massive negative political repercussions of doing that) wouldn't exactly do much for Dart's adoption. I'm trying to imagine some nefarious scenario where that could happen, and I'm having trouble conjuring one up. Evil Chrome exec: Well done, minion! Dart is successful and has lots of users! Now is our chance to attack! Evil Dart exec: What have you in mind, O Master? Evil Chrome exec: Now we'll add a feature to Dart that only the VM supports. Users will have to use Chrome in order to run apps that use that feature! Mua-hahahaha! Evil Dart exec: But master, why would a developer use that feature if they know it will prevent millions of users from running their app? Evil Chrome exec: Uh... it will be such a delightful feature they won't be able to resist. Like... I don't know, currying or something. Evil Dart exec: But what happens if someone just sends us a patch to implement it dart2js too? Evil Chrome exec: Well, don't land it, obviously! Evil Dart exec: What should we say in the code review? Evil Chrome exec: Why do you bother me with these details? Just move ahead with our plan! Evil Dart exec: Remind me again what our plan is master? Evil Chrome exec: To force the world to use Chrome! Soon, we will be as successful as IE6 was! Evil Dart exec: Not to question your wisdom, master, but IE is no longer the dominant browser, so that didn't work out well for them, did it? Also, developers now universally revile IE because of their practices. We'd be shunned if we did something like that.