9 ms·

Google Dart target: Chrome soon, other browsers someday

29 points by daw___ 13y ago

stcredzero 13y ago
Specifically, he pointed to problems with having two separate virtual machines, both trying to clean up computer memory through a process called garbage collection and both trying to control Web page elements through the browser's Document Object Model (DOM) interface. "Two runtimes sharing the DOM adds both bug habitat and a performance tax," Eich said. That's an objection Apple has raised, too. Why have two garbage collectors sharing the DOM? Couldn't one construct a bridge that synthesizes Javascript under the covers to access the DOM and also maintains a reference for the separate Dart GC for the Dart object trying to access the DOM? This would mean that the native Javascript GC wouldn't have to be aware of Dart at all, apart from the presence of some special Javascript objects that don't get collected by it. Then, when the Dart side is done, and the Dart objects go away, remove the "special" flag from the JS bridge objects and let them be collected normally. (There are a few more wrinkles than that, of course.) Performance would be slower for non-native Dart VMs, but it should be possible to leave Javascript GC mostly untouched.
andyl 13y ago
"Works best in Chrome" Microsoft tried this with ActiveX. Deja-vu, all over again. http://technologizer.com/2010/09/16/the-unwelcome-return-of-best-viewed-with-internet-explorer/ http://technologizer.com/2010/09/16/the-unwelcome-return-of-... In Google's words: "The goal of the Dash (Dart) effort is ultimately to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of Web development on the open Web platform" I will never support Google's walled garden. Dart is a pathogen.
- snird 13y ago
  walled garden? ActiveX? your comment is pure FUD. dart is as open as possible - open source, open standard etc' etc'. This is a genuine attempt to make the web better - I'm definitely supporting it.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    > This is a genuine attempt to make the web better Better for Google that is.
    - sethladd 13y ago
      Better for users also (and yes, better for Google because Google makes money when people see and click ads on the web). When the web has more interesting content being produced by more motivated developers, users win. When the web starts up faster, users and vendors win. When pages and apps run much quickly on the web, users and vendors win.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  I fully agree with you. I will only touch Dart when it is natively supported in major browsers or required by our customers.
  - sethladd 13y ago
    Why wait for the VM when you can compile to JavaScript today?
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      Because customers only request JavaScript and I don't want to debug code generated from tools.
      - masklinn 13y ago
        Debugging of generated code has gotten leaps and bounds better in the past few years though.
        pjmlp 13y ago
        True for the desktop, when targeting certain browser versions, though.
        masklinn 13y ago
        Yes, your damping down of the excitement is 100% correct.
      - sethladd 13y ago
        Have you tried to use source maps to help debugging? Plenty of compile-to-JavaScript languages support source maps, and even some CSS frameworks. Building complex/large apps without a compiler and tools is really difficult. GWT, Closure, TypeScript, Dart are all efforts to help developers build more interesting apps that scale. Building/compiling is just a natural step in the process, and source maps are a natural output of that process.
- knocknock 13y ago
  Except that ActiveX works only in Windows. The finance dept where I work all need Windows VMs to access this one website that won't work on OS X.
- masklinn 13y ago
  Dart is more Visual Basic than ActiveX. NaCl is the second coming of ActiveX.
  - spankalee 13y ago
    Dart would be VBScript if VBScript compiled to JavaScript, and the compiler was released well before the native implementation landed in IE.
    - masklinn 13y ago
      VBScript would have compiled to javascript if MS had needed it to.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Microsoft tried this with ActiveX. Deja-vu, all over again. And Netscape (Mozilla's grandaddy) tried it with Javascript. You know, the then proprietary to their browser technology that we now use as a standard. What "works best in X" can eventually be an adopted standard given time. That said, your analogy is also flawed in another way. Active X was faulty technologically (insecure), proprietary and closed source. Dart is better than JS architecturally, is open source, AND is passing through a standards body for standardization. So no relation to Active X at all.
  - Touche 13y ago
    > And Netscape (Mozilla's grandaddy) tried it with Javascript. > You know, the then proprietary to their browser technology that we now use as a standard. What "works best in X" can eventually be an adopted standard given time. While true, everyone agrees that was the wrong way to go and suggesting that we repeat that mistake is... a mistake.
CmonDev 13y ago
I can only hope that one day the tyranny of JS and HTML will be broken.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  And that democracy of desktop becomes the new trend.
- sethladd 13y ago
  If the web community doesn't continue to work on innovative new platform features, and deliver fantastic experiences for mobile users, then native mobile (ios, android) will become the de facto way to deliver apps to users. That day is more likely and closer than some may want to believe. So double check before you say something like your comment. :)
  - masklinn 13y ago
    > then native mobile (ios, android) will become the de facto way to deliver apps to users I don't know which planet you're living on, but native is the de-factor way to deliver apps to users. Apple tried the other one during the first year of iphone, developers mostly sat on their hand and waited for a native SDK. > That day is more likely and closer than some may want to believe. That day is 10 years ago, give or take some. The web has yet to ever become the de-facto way of delivering application on mobile, it's barely getting there on desktop.
    - sethladd 13y ago
      I think the web was a big success on desktop (modulo some pretty big apps like Photoshop, and we should ask ourselves why apps like Photoshop never landed in the browser, and then fix those issues). As for mobile, it's clear a lot of companies have no problem building their app twice (for both iOS and Android).
      - masklinn 13y ago
        > I think the web was a big success on desktop Hear that sound? That's your goalposts scraping the tarmac as you move them around. > As for mobile, it's clear a lot of companies have no problem building their app twice (for both iOS and Android). Which is relevant to the conversation... how?
salient 13y ago
Do we really need another Java-like language? I would think since web development is often an "entry level" for many beginning programmers, we need languages with prettier syntax and easier to grasp, something like Python.
- Alphasite_ 13y ago
  Whats the obsession with beginner friendly languages as of late? I can understand it to some extent, but at the end of the day, as long as its size doesn't cause problems does size really cause long term issues? After all you are going to be using (and learning) the language far longer than you're going to be a beginner.
- pspeter3 13y ago
  I would love to see CoffeeScript with optional typing. Easy syntax, typing support for larger projects and compilation to JavaScript. The new compiler seems like it may actually be possible to support it too.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Dart has optional typing so it should feel familiar to you whether you have a background in Python or Java. IIRC being easy to learn is one of the explicit goals of dart.
- Skoofoo 13y ago
  I have high hopes for Ruby in the browser. https://github.com/opal/opal-browser https://github.com/opal/opal-browser
- sethladd 13y ago
  I find Dart much easier to learn than Java. Check out http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/dart-is-not-the-language-you-think-it-is.html http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/dart-is-not-the-langu... for many differences between Java and Dart.
_greim_ 13y ago
I'm sad that it's a Google-only thing and that all the other browser makers are balking. Purely in terms of the merits of the language, it strikes me as leaps and bounds better than JS. I'm also a fan of Mozilla's asm.js. It seems to have so much potential. As a full-time JS dev, I guess I'm easily impressed. I just wish the browser makers could get their heads together and agree on some way forward, instead of incrementally polishing the JS "turd."
- sethladd 13y ago
  Dart compiles to JavaScript, is open source, and is now in ECMA. The project has mostly Google engineers committing, but we also have plenty of open-source contributions. asm.js is a compile target that takes C/C++ code and outputs lots of typed arrays, and a custom engine to interpret the asm.js "hints". It's an interesting way to get C code onto the web, but developers don't write asm.js code by hand. In contrast, Dart is designed to be written by developers. The similarity is that both asm.js and Dart want to enable faster experiences for users, but they take very different approaches.
  - Touche 13y ago
    > The project has mostly Google engineers committing, but we also have plenty of open-source contributions. How many within the first year of it's development?
    - sethladd 13y ago
      Good question, I'd have to run some queries. dart.googlecode.com and github.com/dart-lang are the two main locations. We receive more patches for the libraries and docs than we do for the VM. But we have received patches for dart2js (a fairly complicated bit of code).
    - masklinn 13y ago
      According to the history of the AUTHORS file (commits are not properly attributed in the repository, as far as I can see) there were 12 "external contributors" in the first year of dart (as a public project anyway): https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/branches/bleeding_edge/AUTHORS?spec=svn13196&r=13196 https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/branches/bleedi...
TheAceOfHearts 13y ago
I saw some benchmarks showing that Dart was slower than JavaScript... Is there truth to this?
- indy 13y ago
  Here are the latest benchmarks: https://www.dartlang.org/performance/ https://www.dartlang.org/performance/
- kyrra 13y ago
  Really depends on what you're doing. The performance benchmark on Dart's site shows some of the strengths of Dart. There are other areas that are weak. See the Computer Language Benchmark Game[0]. A lot of those tests rely on fast i/o handling (be it a file or stdin/stdout). Also being able to work with large data structures and manipulate them in various ways. Dart does decent on some tests but fails on others. Also, all of the implementations are submitted by users, so there may be faster ways to do things, but it at least gives you an idea. [0] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=dart&lang2=v8&data=u32 http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?te...
BrandonSmith 13y ago
Dart could be the glue between Chrome and Android. * Sundar Pichai (Google VP) oversees both Chrome and Android. * Google is experimenting with ART (LLVM-backed AOT runtime) for Android. This could be modified to run Dart directly. * Angular was recently ported to Dart. * Polymer is Google's Web Component polyfill until browsers catch up. * Android layouts and views are essentially a form of components. (Possibly mapped to Web Components???) I could see a singular development vision of Angular + Dart + Web Components where Chrome apps are Android apps and vice versa.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Wow. "We have a language that works only/best in our browser, features that work only/best in our browser, a dominant OS which requires automatically includes/installs our browser." I guess it was a good strategy for Microsoft while it lasted (and still pays benefits) so they might as well copy it. It will be funny if the EU requires Android phones / tablets to give you a 'browser choice' when you first turn them on / install them.
- sethladd 13y ago
  Browsers should compete on performance. As long as dart2js outputs efficient JavaScript (current benchmarks: https://www.dartlang.org/performance https://www.dartlang.org/performance) so that Dart code runs well on browsers without the VM, I think it's fine if some browsers run Dart more efficiently than others. Consider Dart VM as an accelerated way to run Dart code which otherwise runs fine in other browsers. To be very clear, Dart runs across the modern web when you compile it to JavaScript, so it's not a language that works only in one browser.
  - pcwalton 13y ago
    > To be very clear, Dart runs across the modern web when you compile it to JavaScript, so it's not a language that works only in one browser. What stops sites from shipping Dart only and not shipping the JavaScript?
    - RyanZAG 13y ago
      Nothing. Expect some sneaky deals on special Chrome apps in the future that will convince popular apps (with a nice sum of money) to have their hot new app being 'dart exclusive'. It's the obvious end game that sounds cynical if not for the fact that every single company in that position has historically abused that position.
    - lukesandberg 13y ago
      The same thing that prevents sites from shipping sites that only support particular browsers today.
fidotron 13y ago
Mozilla's take on Dart really strikes me as an emotional and not technical reaction. They may have a valid point about PNaCl, but Dart presents the opportunity to do a managed transition from JavaScript to something better. Having someone for whom JS is their baby as your CTO is going to make letting go very difficult.
- rtpg 13y ago
  If we're going to choose a transition language, maybe we should think about it a bit more ? Considering how different paradigms are entering mainstream, why jump for a class-based statically typed OOP-heavy language? Dart might be better than JS, but is it better than most other candidate languages?
- vor_ 13y ago
  Well, until recently, the proposed transition was to a non-standard language controlled by one company. We'll see if the attempt to standardize Dart has a positive effect.
  - thesnider 13y ago
    Like asm.js?
    - pcwalton 13y ago
      asm.js is standardized, in that its semantics are fully defined by ECMA-262, which is a multi-vendor, widely implemented standard.
      - masklinn 13y ago
        I may be wrong, but I see Math.imul as part of the asm.js spec and I believe it's an extension on ECMA-252.5 (and related libraries, IIRC typed arrays are part of the webgl stuff, not ECMA-262)
        13y ago
JonSkeptic 13y ago
It probably won't be successful, but I'm excited. I can't stop dreaming of a future devoid of javascript.
liviu 13y ago
We wait first for Google to put Dart into Android development... then we'll take a look at him.
manishsharan 13y ago
I have always wondered whether an average Javascript programmer could generate ninja like javascript code using Dart ? If so, I would gladly invest the time to learn Dart.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
kyrra 13y ago
Google is a large company that is pushing various tech from a lot of different angles. You have the V8 team that has done a lot of great work for Javascript speeds. Members of V8 also were part of the EMCAScript committee to help move the language forward. With Google's focus on Dart, some of those V8 members have moved on to Dart. Google has also been doing a lot of work with the Shadow DOM, Polymer, and lots of other fun tech. Dart is an experiment to see if they can create a better scripting language for the web. Who knows if it'll work out, but it's nice to see a company trying something a little out there. I'm sure creating large web apps like GMail or Docs in Dart would be much more pleasurable than doing it in Javascript. For smaller scripts just to do simple form stuff, it probably won't be any better (but hopefully not worse than Javascript today).
voidr 13y ago
As a web developer I have to say: a 2x increase in JS performance is insignificant. If I would profile most web apps, JS execution wouldn't account for much of the processing time, the DOM interactions are order of magnitude slower. Users would barely notice a 2x increase in JS speed. Also the snapshotting could be done with JS too if Google would be really concerned about startup time. I would say that at this given moment in time the performance argument is BS, the real reason is that most of Google are Java developers that probably don't like JavaScript and they want something that looks more like Java, because that's what they are used to. JavaScript has it's issues, however I think that TypeScript the superior approach towards these kinds of problems.

29 points by daw___ 13y ago

Specifically, he pointed to problems with having two separate virtual machines, both trying to clean up computer memory through a process called garbage collection and both trying to control Web page elements through the browser's Document Object Model (DOM) interface. "Two runtimes sharing the DOM adds both bug habitat and a performance tax," Eich said. That's an objection Apple has raised, too. Why have two garbage collectors sharing the DOM? Couldn't one construct a bridge that synthesizes Javascript under the covers to access the DOM and also maintains a reference for the separate Dart GC for the Dart object trying to access the DOM? This would mean that the native Javascript GC wouldn't have to be aware of Dart at all, apart from the presence of some special Javascript objects that don't get collected by it. Then, when the Dart side is done, and the Dart objects go away, remove the "special" flag from the JS bridge objects and let them be collected normally. (There are a few more wrinkles than that, of course.) Performance would be slower for non-native Dart VMs, but it should be possible to leave Javascript GC mostly untouched.

andyl 13y ago

"Works best in Chrome" Microsoft tried this with ActiveX. Deja-vu, all over again. http://technologizer.com/2010/09/16/the-unwelcome-return-of-best-viewed-with-internet-explorer/ http://technologizer.com/2010/09/16/the-unwelcome-return-of-... In Google's words: "The goal of the Dash (Dart) effort is ultimately to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of Web development on the open Web platform" I will never support Google's walled garden. Dart is a pathogen.

snird 13y ago
walled garden? ActiveX? your comment is pure FUD. dart is as open as possible - open source, open standard etc' etc'. This is a genuine attempt to make the web better - I'm definitely supporting it.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  > This is a genuine attempt to make the web better Better for Google that is.
  - sethladd 13y ago
    Better for users also (and yes, better for Google because Google makes money when people see and click ads on the web). When the web has more interesting content being produced by more motivated developers, users win. When the web starts up faster, users and vendors win. When pages and apps run much quickly on the web, users and vendors win.
pjmlp 13y ago
I fully agree with you. I will only touch Dart when it is natively supported in major browsers or required by our customers.
- sethladd 13y ago
  Why wait for the VM when you can compile to JavaScript today?
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Because customers only request JavaScript and I don't want to debug code generated from tools.
    - masklinn 13y ago
      Debugging of generated code has gotten leaps and bounds better in the past few years though.
      - pjmlp 13y ago
        True for the desktop, when targeting certain browser versions, though.
        masklinn 13y ago
        Yes, your damping down of the excitement is 100% correct.
    - sethladd 13y ago
      Have you tried to use source maps to help debugging? Plenty of compile-to-JavaScript languages support source maps, and even some CSS frameworks. Building complex/large apps without a compiler and tools is really difficult. GWT, Closure, TypeScript, Dart are all efforts to help developers build more interesting apps that scale. Building/compiling is just a natural step in the process, and source maps are a natural output of that process.
knocknock 13y ago
Except that ActiveX works only in Windows. The finance dept where I work all need Windows VMs to access this one website that won't work on OS X.
masklinn 13y ago
Dart is more Visual Basic than ActiveX. NaCl is the second coming of ActiveX.
- spankalee 13y ago
  Dart would be VBScript if VBScript compiled to JavaScript, and the compiler was released well before the native implementation landed in IE.
  - masklinn 13y ago
    VBScript would have compiled to javascript if MS had needed it to.
coldtea 13y ago
>Microsoft tried this with ActiveX. Deja-vu, all over again. And Netscape (Mozilla's grandaddy) tried it with Javascript. You know, the then proprietary to their browser technology that we now use as a standard. What "works best in X" can eventually be an adopted standard given time. That said, your analogy is also flawed in another way. Active X was faulty technologically (insecure), proprietary and closed source. Dart is better than JS architecturally, is open source, AND is passing through a standards body for standardization. So no relation to Active X at all.
- Touche 13y ago
  > And Netscape (Mozilla's grandaddy) tried it with Javascript. > You know, the then proprietary to their browser technology that we now use as a standard. What "works best in X" can eventually be an adopted standard given time. While true, everyone agrees that was the wrong way to go and suggesting that we repeat that mistake is... a mistake.

CmonDev 13y ago

I can only hope that one day the tyranny of JS and HTML will be broken.

pjmlp 13y ago
And that democracy of desktop becomes the new trend.
sethladd 13y ago
If the web community doesn't continue to work on innovative new platform features, and deliver fantastic experiences for mobile users, then native mobile (ios, android) will become the de facto way to deliver apps to users. That day is more likely and closer than some may want to believe. So double check before you say something like your comment. :)
- masklinn 13y ago
  > then native mobile (ios, android) will become the de facto way to deliver apps to users I don't know which planet you're living on, but native is the de-factor way to deliver apps to users. Apple tried the other one during the first year of iphone, developers mostly sat on their hand and waited for a native SDK. > That day is more likely and closer than some may want to believe. That day is 10 years ago, give or take some. The web has yet to ever become the de-facto way of delivering application on mobile, it's barely getting there on desktop.
  - sethladd 13y ago
    I think the web was a big success on desktop (modulo some pretty big apps like Photoshop, and we should ask ourselves why apps like Photoshop never landed in the browser, and then fix those issues). As for mobile, it's clear a lot of companies have no problem building their app twice (for both iOS and Android).
    - masklinn 13y ago
      > I think the web was a big success on desktop Hear that sound? That's your goalposts scraping the tarmac as you move them around. > As for mobile, it's clear a lot of companies have no problem building their app twice (for both iOS and Android). Which is relevant to the conversation... how?

salient 13y ago

Do we really need another Java-like language? I would think since web development is often an "entry level" for many beginning programmers, we need languages with prettier syntax and easier to grasp, something like Python.

Alphasite_ 13y ago
Whats the obsession with beginner friendly languages as of late? I can understand it to some extent, but at the end of the day, as long as its size doesn't cause problems does size really cause long term issues? After all you are going to be using (and learning) the language far longer than you're going to be a beginner.
pspeter3 13y ago
I would love to see CoffeeScript with optional typing. Easy syntax, typing support for larger projects and compilation to JavaScript. The new compiler seems like it may actually be possible to support it too.
jiggy2011 13y ago
Dart has optional typing so it should feel familiar to you whether you have a background in Python or Java. IIRC being easy to learn is one of the explicit goals of dart.
Skoofoo 13y ago
I have high hopes for Ruby in the browser. https://github.com/opal/opal-browser https://github.com/opal/opal-browser
sethladd 13y ago
I find Dart much easier to learn than Java. Check out http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/dart-is-not-the-language-you-think-it-is.html http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/dart-is-not-the-langu... for many differences between Java and Dart.

_greim_ 13y ago

I'm sad that it's a Google-only thing and that all the other browser makers are balking. Purely in terms of the merits of the language, it strikes me as leaps and bounds better than JS. I'm also a fan of Mozilla's asm.js. It seems to have so much potential. As a full-time JS dev, I guess I'm easily impressed. I just wish the browser makers could get their heads together and agree on some way forward, instead of incrementally polishing the JS "turd."

sethladd 13y ago
Dart compiles to JavaScript, is open source, and is now in ECMA. The project has mostly Google engineers committing, but we also have plenty of open-source contributions. asm.js is a compile target that takes C/C++ code and outputs lots of typed arrays, and a custom engine to interpret the asm.js "hints". It's an interesting way to get C code onto the web, but developers don't write asm.js code by hand. In contrast, Dart is designed to be written by developers. The similarity is that both asm.js and Dart want to enable faster experiences for users, but they take very different approaches.
- Touche 13y ago
  > The project has mostly Google engineers committing, but we also have plenty of open-source contributions. How many within the first year of it's development?
  - sethladd 13y ago
    Good question, I'd have to run some queries. dart.googlecode.com and github.com/dart-lang are the two main locations. We receive more patches for the libraries and docs than we do for the VM. But we have received patches for dart2js (a fairly complicated bit of code).
  - masklinn 13y ago
    According to the history of the AUTHORS file (commits are not properly attributed in the repository, as far as I can see) there were 12 "external contributors" in the first year of dart (as a public project anyway): https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/branches/bleeding_edge/AUTHORS?spec=svn13196&r=13196 https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/branches/bleedi...

TheAceOfHearts 13y ago

I saw some benchmarks showing that Dart was slower than JavaScript... Is there truth to this?

indy 13y ago
Here are the latest benchmarks: https://www.dartlang.org/performance/ https://www.dartlang.org/performance/
kyrra 13y ago
Really depends on what you're doing. The performance benchmark on Dart's site shows some of the strengths of Dart. There are other areas that are weak. See the Computer Language Benchmark Game[0]. A lot of those tests rely on fast i/o handling (be it a file or stdin/stdout). Also being able to work with large data structures and manipulate them in various ways. Dart does decent on some tests but fails on others. Also, all of the implementations are submitted by users, so there may be faster ways to do things, but it at least gives you an idea. [0] http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=dart&lang2=v8&data=u32 http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?te...

BrandonSmith 13y ago

Dart could be the glue between Chrome and Android. * Sundar Pichai (Google VP) oversees both Chrome and Android. * Google is experimenting with ART (LLVM-backed AOT runtime) for Android. This could be modified to run Dart directly. * Angular was recently ported to Dart. * Polymer is Google's Web Component polyfill until browsers catch up. * Android layouts and views are essentially a form of components. (Possibly mapped to Web Components???) I could see a singular development vision of Angular + Dart + Web Components where Chrome apps are Android apps and vice versa.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Wow. "We have a language that works only/best in our browser, features that work only/best in our browser, a dominant OS which requires automatically includes/installs our browser." I guess it was a good strategy for Microsoft while it lasted (and still pays benefits) so they might as well copy it. It will be funny if the EU requires Android phones / tablets to give you a 'browser choice' when you first turn them on / install them.

sethladd 13y ago
Browsers should compete on performance. As long as dart2js outputs efficient JavaScript (current benchmarks: https://www.dartlang.org/performance https://www.dartlang.org/performance) so that Dart code runs well on browsers without the VM, I think it's fine if some browsers run Dart more efficiently than others. Consider Dart VM as an accelerated way to run Dart code which otherwise runs fine in other browsers. To be very clear, Dart runs across the modern web when you compile it to JavaScript, so it's not a language that works only in one browser.
- pcwalton 13y ago
  > To be very clear, Dart runs across the modern web when you compile it to JavaScript, so it's not a language that works only in one browser. What stops sites from shipping Dart only and not shipping the JavaScript?
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    Nothing. Expect some sneaky deals on special Chrome apps in the future that will convince popular apps (with a nice sum of money) to have their hot new app being 'dart exclusive'. It's the obvious end game that sounds cynical if not for the fact that every single company in that position has historically abused that position.
  - lukesandberg 13y ago
    The same thing that prevents sites from shipping sites that only support particular browsers today.

fidotron 13y ago

Mozilla's take on Dart really strikes me as an emotional and not technical reaction. They may have a valid point about PNaCl, but Dart presents the opportunity to do a managed transition from JavaScript to something better. Having someone for whom JS is their baby as your CTO is going to make letting go very difficult.

rtpg 13y ago
If we're going to choose a transition language, maybe we should think about it a bit more ? Considering how different paradigms are entering mainstream, why jump for a class-based statically typed OOP-heavy language? Dart might be better than JS, but is it better than most other candidate languages?
vor_ 13y ago
Well, until recently, the proposed transition was to a non-standard language controlled by one company. We'll see if the attempt to standardize Dart has a positive effect.
- thesnider 13y ago
  Like asm.js?
  - pcwalton 13y ago
    asm.js is standardized, in that its semantics are fully defined by ECMA-262, which is a multi-vendor, widely implemented standard.
    - masklinn 13y ago
      I may be wrong, but I see Math.imul as part of the asm.js spec and I believe it's an extension on ECMA-252.5 (and related libraries, IIRC typed arrays are part of the webgl stuff, not ECMA-262)
      - 13y ago

JonSkeptic 13y ago

It probably won't be successful, but I'm excited. I can't stop dreaming of a future devoid of javascript.

liviu 13y ago

We wait first for Google to put Dart into Android development... then we'll take a look at him.

manishsharan 13y ago

I have always wondered whether an average Javascript programmer could generate ninja like javascript code using Dart ? If so, I would gladly invest the time to learn Dart.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

kyrra 13y ago

Google is a large company that is pushing various tech from a lot of different angles. You have the V8 team that has done a lot of great work for Javascript speeds. Members of V8 also were part of the EMCAScript committee to help move the language forward. With Google's focus on Dart, some of those V8 members have moved on to Dart. Google has also been doing a lot of work with the Shadow DOM, Polymer, and lots of other fun tech. Dart is an experiment to see if they can create a better scripting language for the web. Who knows if it'll work out, but it's nice to see a company trying something a little out there. I'm sure creating large web apps like GMail or Docs in Dart would be much more pleasurable than doing it in Javascript. For smaller scripts just to do simple form stuff, it probably won't be any better (but hopefully not worse than Javascript today).

voidr 13y ago

As a web developer I have to say: a 2x increase in JS performance is insignificant. If I would profile most web apps, JS execution wouldn't account for much of the processing time, the DOM interactions are order of magnitude slower. Users would barely notice a 2x increase in JS speed. Also the snapshotting could be done with JS too if Google would be really concerned about startup time. I would say that at this given moment in time the performance argument is BS, the real reason is that most of Google are Java developers that probably don't like JavaScript and they want something that looks more like Java, because that's what they are used to. JavaScript has it's issues, however I think that TypeScript the superior approach towards these kinds of problems.