9 ms·

Dart Lang 1.2 Released

85 points by WoodenChair 13y ago

themckman 13y ago
Working on a project that I kind of want to use the same language for the frontend and the backend. There's, obviously, vanilla JS, maybe clojure and clojurescript, but Dart... For some reason I never realized it could be used server side. Anyone have any practical experience with an app built entirely in Dart?
- xxgreg 13y ago
  It works. There are a few people using it server side. There is a Heroku build pack. The HTTP server is a bit slow, sounds like this is being addressed, and shouldn't be a limiting factor. I wrote a postgresql driver, which works ok. More users, issues filed and patches are always welcome ;)
- xster 13y ago
  Now if meteorjs does Dart too... one language to rule them all
andyl 13y ago
Dart: Google's ActiveX
- Symmetry 13y ago
  Would ActiveX have been so bad if it was open source and not tied into the operating system?
  - corysama 13y ago
    ...and sandboxed? Dart is a fine language. The main thing is has going against it is the feature widely referred to as "Is Not JavaScript". Thus, the Dart-to-JavaScript compiler.
  - nivla 13y ago
    >Would ActiveX have been so bad if it was open source and not tied into the operating system? This is my personal view and it may not be accurate: I don't think being open source or cross platform would have mattered to an average PC user back then. Windows held the dominance among PC users (>95%). It wasn't until the rise of firefox that people started noticing the benefits of open source and standards. ActiveX failed because it was way ahead of its time and that it wasn't sandboxed/virtualized making it a security blunder. The one click front door to your OS resulted in a flurry of exploits and viruses giving its bad rep as we know. Dart is leading the same path but in a secure way. I think eventually we will end up there with Web Apps and its only a matter of who gets there first.
- egeozcan 13y ago
  I'm not a big fan of Dart but IMHO a "leaked" internal memo on replacing JavaScript and an implementation as a browser embeddable VM which isn't used even in Chrome don't make it as evil as ActiveX.
- pix64 13y ago
  Isn't that NaCl?
- haberman 13y ago
  Dart is nothing like ActiveX. But apparently it is "cool" to invoke ActiveX for any browser technology you don't like. ActiveX was a way of loading untrusted binaries in-process with the browser and running them unsandboxed. Does Dart run untrusted machine code unsandboxed? No. If Dart is Google's ActiveX, then JavaScript is Netscape's ActiveX, Java is Sun's ActiveX and Emscripten is Mozilla's ActiveX. (Note: none of these is actually true) Comparisons to Silverlight or Flash would also be inaccurate, since neither can compile to JavaScript and both are closed-source technologies that are not on any path to being standardized.
  - stusmall 13y ago
    Honestly, ActiveX/JApplet comparison seems pretty fair to me. I know you said Java, but still.
    - haberman 13y ago
      Java Applets run sandboxed. ActiveX did not. It's the difference between running an exe attached to an email and visiting a web page that runs JavaScript. Do these sound the same to you? For more info see: http://sip.cs.princeton.edu/java-vs-activex.html http://sip.cs.princeton.edu/java-vs-activex.html
      - stusmall 13y ago
        Sure there is a sandbox... but its a bit leaky
  - msoad 13y ago
    It's safe to defend Dart to the point that your Gmail will run faster in Chrome that has Dart VM. Then Firefox and IE might fall behind in performing for Google web apps and then you will see how Dart will hurt web ecosystem. I'm just guessing. So far Dart2JS is pretty close to native Dart.
    - haberman 13y ago
      To me this is like saying: "it's safe to defend Servo up to the point that it's faster single-threaded browser engines. Then Chrome and IE might fall behind in performing for web apps and then you will see how Servo will hurt the web ecosystem." To be honest, I hope that Servo out-performs the current browser engines, and the that other browsers feel pressure to follow suit, because it will push the web forward as a whole. It's like SpiderMonkey and V8 did with JS performance five years ago. Now you will probably say "but Dart is a new content type," and I see where you are coming from. But to me it's no different than asm.js. asm.js a new content type also, it just happens to be very clever and outputs programs which are a Polyglot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing)) of the new asm.js content type and regular JS. It is very cool how they have done this, but it doesn't change the fact that asm.js, when processed by an asm.js-aware compiler, is a different content type than regular JS and is processed in a different way that is intended to be faster than plain JS. So to me, a putting Dart source file right next to Dart2JS output on the open web is no different than asm.js, and I think both are equally valid approaches to moving the web forward.
- jamra 13y ago
  Dart can compile into javascript. It is nothing like ActiveX. ActiveX is basically running native code from the browser. How are you making this link?
  - Mikeb85 13y ago
    Dart's original purpose was having its own VM run in the browser - search 'Dartium'. Only when that idea failed to gain traction did they turn it into a compile-to-js language...
    - floitsch 13y ago
      Dart2js was there from the beginning and the project was always well stuffed. It was never an afterthought and some decisions in the Dart language were taken because of the constraints we have when compiling to JavaScript.
lukasm 13y ago
I'd love to see dart going mainstream, but nobody would integrate VM, except google.
- melling 13y ago
  It doesn't matter. It compiles to JS and you still get a better language in which to develop large apps. The generated JS is probably faster because of the static analysis.
  - lukasm 13y ago
    Of course it does. Extra abstraction that may cause pain in fixing nasty production bugs, can't use goodies from Dart jak SIMP etc. Logically it doesn't matter, but empirically that doesn't happen.
- xster 13y ago
  Integrating to client side is also just half of the story. It can also be the new node.js which didn't have to integrate with anyone.
stefantalpalaru 13y ago
It's "Dart" not "Dart lang" just like it's "Go" not "Golang". Let's keep SEO out of common language.
- Lambdanaut 13y ago
  sudo apt-get install golang
  - stefantalpalaru 13y ago
    emerge go
afsina 13y ago
Here is the announcement page: http://news.dartlang.org/2014/02/dart-v1-2.html http://news.dartlang.org/2014/02/dart-v1-2.html And release notes: https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!msg/announce/Pm0DH7B6V6Y/BDD-ArOJsf4J https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!msg/announc...
puppetmaster3 13y ago
Comparing TypeScript to Dart, one is clearly much better.
- discreteevent 13y ago
  Would you like to share the answer with the rest of the class?
  - puppetmaster3 13y ago
    My comment was for the people that tried both, not bait for the people that know one and not the other.
gtaylor 13y ago
I've been working on a Dart project (http://frontiermap.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ http://frontiermap.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/) with StageXL, a Dart transcription of ActionScript's library: http://www.stagexl.org/ http://www.stagexl.org/ I've been meaning to write a blog post on my experience with Dart and StageXL, but as far as the Dart part of things, a few misc. observations: * Dart shows a lot of influence from Java, and obviously some tinges of JS. I don't really care, I wanted a productive web language with optional static types. * It is a "boring" language in that it's not doing anything new or earth-shattering syntactically or conceptually. This ended up being a positive to me, in that I was able to ramp up extremely quickly. I'm a Pythonista by trade, I know enough JS/CoffeeScript to get by, and I've got a little bit of Java experience. * Dart comes with so many tools, to the point where I'm not constantly trying to find and piece together core components like "module" imports, package managers, unit test frameworks, documentation generators, IDE. Not all of the tools are extremely polished at this point (their package browsing/searching site is incredibly basic), but there is a clear "way" to do most things. There's nothing stopping anyone from writing alternatives to the official stuff, either. * The Dart->JS interop is OK for simple usage cases, but can get a bit complex for others. This is my only big hangup for non-hobby projects. This will improve with time, but it's very clunky for now. * Types don't have to be specified, but I have tended to provide them for everything. I really like being able to do this, even coming from a Python background. * The Dart IDE is surprisingly helpful. Debugging is decent, and they've stripped a ton of the bloat out from its Eclipse underpinnings. It does crash a bit on Arch Linux with the latest Oracle Java, though. That said, I hope they get in with the IDEA guys like they did for Android. * My particular project uses WebGL, and I'm compiling to JS. I have yet to run into any complications with the conversion, and the generated JS has worked well on my two mid-range dev machines (Linux and Mac OS 10.9 on Chrome and Firefox). * The error messages shown during interpretation/compiling are helpful most of the time, but can get a little more cryptic in certain cases (I've yet to find a pattern, but there probably is). I expect this to improve with time. Overall, I have been very pleased with Dart, and like it (as a langauge) a lot better than CoffeeScript. Optional types has been my favorite feature, and I really like how "batteries included" Dart is. I'm a backend guy, so I don't have the drive or mental bandwidth to go looking at the various packaging/importing/testing/doc utils in JS land (although that is a perfectly viable approach if you have the time and experience). The ecosystem obviously can't be compared to JS, since Dart is in its infancy. It'll be good enough for some usage cases, but you may find yourself re-inventing things for others (or shoe-horning things in via the JS interop). For hobby projects, Dart is going to get the nod over the alternatives (Typescript, CoffeeScript, pure JS) until it burns me.
fidotron 13y ago
Politics aside, I find it interesting Dart isn't getting much traction at this point. It seems it should be in a similar position to Java during the first wave, but it clearly isn't. By itself it's clearly not bad, it's just not better enough than what is there already to suffer the inter-ecosystem pain with native JS. Since it can't do anything JS can't the only selling point it really has is to build large JS systems in some other safer language, but we've been there before with GWT, and that didn't set the world on fire either.
- WoodenChair 13y ago
  I think it's still early days. There are large projects underway in Dart, like Spark. Once an app that everyone is using is written in Dart, I think it will spur further adoption. With that said, there has been clear growth - as an outsider not on the team, to me that growth looks linear rather than exponential, but it's steady and clearly there. Of course inclusion in Chrome or Android will mean sudden exponential growth perhaps.
- RamiK 13y ago
  Java (Vs. Visual C++) had the industry and Academia trying to break free from Microsoft's grip by going cross-platform and later in-browser. Dart just doesn't have that kind of driving force going for it.
  - fidotron 13y ago
    True, I had missed that. Maybe it's that environments mean much more than languages, and with Java the JVM was the killer thing which dragged the language with it. Spark might be that killer platform for Dart, but it strikes me as wishful thinking, especially with players like github coming into that side of the market.
tarpden 13y ago
Is pub.dartlang.org Dart's "CPAN"? I don't know Dart, but it looks as if you need a Google account to upload packages to that central package repo. Is that correct?

85 points by WoodenChair 13y ago

Working on a project that I kind of want to use the same language for the frontend and the backend. There's, obviously, vanilla JS, maybe clojure and clojurescript, but Dart... For some reason I never realized it could be used server side. Anyone have any practical experience with an app built entirely in Dart?

xxgreg 13y ago
It works. There are a few people using it server side. There is a Heroku build pack. The HTTP server is a bit slow, sounds like this is being addressed, and shouldn't be a limiting factor. I wrote a postgresql driver, which works ok. More users, issues filed and patches are always welcome ;)
xster 13y ago
Now if meteorjs does Dart too... one language to rule them all

andyl 13y ago

Dart: Google's ActiveX

Symmetry 13y ago
Would ActiveX have been so bad if it was open source and not tied into the operating system?
- corysama 13y ago
  ...and sandboxed? Dart is a fine language. The main thing is has going against it is the feature widely referred to as "Is Not JavaScript". Thus, the Dart-to-JavaScript compiler.
- nivla 13y ago
  >Would ActiveX have been so bad if it was open source and not tied into the operating system? This is my personal view and it may not be accurate: I don't think being open source or cross platform would have mattered to an average PC user back then. Windows held the dominance among PC users (>95%). It wasn't until the rise of firefox that people started noticing the benefits of open source and standards. ActiveX failed because it was way ahead of its time and that it wasn't sandboxed/virtualized making it a security blunder. The one click front door to your OS resulted in a flurry of exploits and viruses giving its bad rep as we know. Dart is leading the same path but in a secure way. I think eventually we will end up there with Web Apps and its only a matter of who gets there first.
egeozcan 13y ago
I'm not a big fan of Dart but IMHO a "leaked" internal memo on replacing JavaScript and an implementation as a browser embeddable VM which isn't used even in Chrome don't make it as evil as ActiveX.
pix64 13y ago
Isn't that NaCl?
haberman 13y ago
Dart is nothing like ActiveX. But apparently it is "cool" to invoke ActiveX for any browser technology you don't like. ActiveX was a way of loading untrusted binaries in-process with the browser and running them unsandboxed. Does Dart run untrusted machine code unsandboxed? No. If Dart is Google's ActiveX, then JavaScript is Netscape's ActiveX, Java is Sun's ActiveX and Emscripten is Mozilla's ActiveX. (Note: none of these is actually true) Comparisons to Silverlight or Flash would also be inaccurate, since neither can compile to JavaScript and both are closed-source technologies that are not on any path to being standardized.
- stusmall 13y ago
  Honestly, ActiveX/JApplet comparison seems pretty fair to me. I know you said Java, but still.
  - haberman 13y ago
    Java Applets run sandboxed. ActiveX did not. It's the difference between running an exe attached to an email and visiting a web page that runs JavaScript. Do these sound the same to you? For more info see: http://sip.cs.princeton.edu/java-vs-activex.html http://sip.cs.princeton.edu/java-vs-activex.html
    - stusmall 13y ago
      Sure there is a sandbox... but its a bit leaky
- msoad 13y ago
  It's safe to defend Dart to the point that your Gmail will run faster in Chrome that has Dart VM. Then Firefox and IE might fall behind in performing for Google web apps and then you will see how Dart will hurt web ecosystem. I'm just guessing. So far Dart2JS is pretty close to native Dart.
  - haberman 13y ago
    To me this is like saying: "it's safe to defend Servo up to the point that it's faster single-threaded browser engines. Then Chrome and IE might fall behind in performing for web apps and then you will see how Servo will hurt the web ecosystem." To be honest, I hope that Servo out-performs the current browser engines, and the that other browsers feel pressure to follow suit, because it will push the web forward as a whole. It's like SpiderMonkey and V8 did with JS performance five years ago. Now you will probably say "but Dart is a new content type," and I see where you are coming from. But to me it's no different than asm.js. asm.js a new content type also, it just happens to be very clever and outputs programs which are a Polyglot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglot_(computing)) of the new asm.js content type and regular JS. It is very cool how they have done this, but it doesn't change the fact that asm.js, when processed by an asm.js-aware compiler, is a different content type than regular JS and is processed in a different way that is intended to be faster than plain JS. So to me, a putting Dart source file right next to Dart2JS output on the open web is no different than asm.js, and I think both are equally valid approaches to moving the web forward.
jamra 13y ago
Dart can compile into javascript. It is nothing like ActiveX. ActiveX is basically running native code from the browser. How are you making this link?
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  Dart's original purpose was having its own VM run in the browser - search 'Dartium'. Only when that idea failed to gain traction did they turn it into a compile-to-js language...
  - floitsch 13y ago
    Dart2js was there from the beginning and the project was always well stuffed. It was never an afterthought and some decisions in the Dart language were taken because of the constraints we have when compiling to JavaScript.

lukasm 13y ago

I'd love to see dart going mainstream, but nobody would integrate VM, except google.

melling 13y ago
It doesn't matter. It compiles to JS and you still get a better language in which to develop large apps. The generated JS is probably faster because of the static analysis.
- lukasm 13y ago
  Of course it does. Extra abstraction that may cause pain in fixing nasty production bugs, can't use goodies from Dart jak SIMP etc. Logically it doesn't matter, but empirically that doesn't happen.
xster 13y ago
Integrating to client side is also just half of the story. It can also be the new node.js which didn't have to integrate with anyone.

stefantalpalaru 13y ago

It's "Dart" not "Dart lang" just like it's "Go" not "Golang". Let's keep SEO out of common language.

Lambdanaut 13y ago
sudo apt-get install golang
- stefantalpalaru 13y ago
  emerge go

afsina 13y ago

Here is the announcement page: http://news.dartlang.org/2014/02/dart-v1-2.html http://news.dartlang.org/2014/02/dart-v1-2.html And release notes: https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!msg/announce/Pm0DH7B6V6Y/BDD-ArOJsf4J https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!msg/announc...

puppetmaster3 13y ago

Comparing TypeScript to Dart, one is clearly much better.

discreteevent 13y ago
Would you like to share the answer with the rest of the class?
- puppetmaster3 13y ago
  My comment was for the people that tried both, not bait for the people that know one and not the other.

gtaylor 13y ago

I've been working on a Dart project (http://frontiermap.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ http://frontiermap.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/) with StageXL, a Dart transcription of ActionScript's library: http://www.stagexl.org/ http://www.stagexl.org/ I've been meaning to write a blog post on my experience with Dart and StageXL, but as far as the Dart part of things, a few misc. observations: * Dart shows a lot of influence from Java, and obviously some tinges of JS. I don't really care, I wanted a productive web language with optional static types. * It is a "boring" language in that it's not doing anything new or earth-shattering syntactically or conceptually. This ended up being a positive to me, in that I was able to ramp up extremely quickly. I'm a Pythonista by trade, I know enough JS/CoffeeScript to get by, and I've got a little bit of Java experience. * Dart comes with so many tools, to the point where I'm not constantly trying to find and piece together core components like "module" imports, package managers, unit test frameworks, documentation generators, IDE. Not all of the tools are extremely polished at this point (their package browsing/searching site is incredibly basic), but there is a clear "way" to do most things. There's nothing stopping anyone from writing alternatives to the official stuff, either. * The Dart->JS interop is OK for simple usage cases, but can get a bit complex for others. This is my only big hangup for non-hobby projects. This will improve with time, but it's very clunky for now. * Types don't have to be specified, but I have tended to provide them for everything. I really like being able to do this, even coming from a Python background. * The Dart IDE is surprisingly helpful. Debugging is decent, and they've stripped a ton of the bloat out from its Eclipse underpinnings. It does crash a bit on Arch Linux with the latest Oracle Java, though. That said, I hope they get in with the IDEA guys like they did for Android. * My particular project uses WebGL, and I'm compiling to JS. I have yet to run into any complications with the conversion, and the generated JS has worked well on my two mid-range dev machines (Linux and Mac OS 10.9 on Chrome and Firefox). * The error messages shown during interpretation/compiling are helpful most of the time, but can get a little more cryptic in certain cases (I've yet to find a pattern, but there probably is). I expect this to improve with time. Overall, I have been very pleased with Dart, and like it (as a langauge) a lot better than CoffeeScript. Optional types has been my favorite feature, and I really like how "batteries included" Dart is. I'm a backend guy, so I don't have the drive or mental bandwidth to go looking at the various packaging/importing/testing/doc utils in JS land (although that is a perfectly viable approach if you have the time and experience). The ecosystem obviously can't be compared to JS, since Dart is in its infancy. It'll be good enough for some usage cases, but you may find yourself re-inventing things for others (or shoe-horning things in via the JS interop). For hobby projects, Dart is going to get the nod over the alternatives (Typescript, CoffeeScript, pure JS) until it burns me.

fidotron 13y ago

Politics aside, I find it interesting Dart isn't getting much traction at this point. It seems it should be in a similar position to Java during the first wave, but it clearly isn't. By itself it's clearly not bad, it's just not better enough than what is there already to suffer the inter-ecosystem pain with native JS. Since it can't do anything JS can't the only selling point it really has is to build large JS systems in some other safer language, but we've been there before with GWT, and that didn't set the world on fire either.

WoodenChair 13y ago
I think it's still early days. There are large projects underway in Dart, like Spark. Once an app that everyone is using is written in Dart, I think it will spur further adoption. With that said, there has been clear growth - as an outsider not on the team, to me that growth looks linear rather than exponential, but it's steady and clearly there. Of course inclusion in Chrome or Android will mean sudden exponential growth perhaps.
RamiK 13y ago
Java (Vs. Visual C++) had the industry and Academia trying to break free from Microsoft's grip by going cross-platform and later in-browser. Dart just doesn't have that kind of driving force going for it.
- fidotron 13y ago
  True, I had missed that. Maybe it's that environments mean much more than languages, and with Java the JVM was the killer thing which dragged the language with it. Spark might be that killer platform for Dart, but it strikes me as wishful thinking, especially with players like github coming into that side of the market.

tarpden 13y ago

Is pub.dartlang.org Dart's "CPAN"? I don't know Dart, but it looks as if you need a Google account to upload packages to that central package repo. Is that correct?