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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 th

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.

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.