21 ms·

Dart 1.5

160 points by dboyd 12y ago

ben336 12y ago
Is anybody using Dart for significant production code outside of Google? (Not mocking, genuinely curious to hear whats being done with it)
- mda 12y ago
  https://www.dartlang.org/community/who-uses-dart.html https://www.dartlang.org/community/who-uses-dart.html
  - gsnedders 12y ago
    Surprisingly few Google properties on there, I must say. Yes, many most certainly have large existing code-bases, but that it doesn't include things like the new Google Maps (which, AIUI, has relatively little in common with the old version) seems… interesting.
    - spankalee 12y ago
      Google Maps was almost certainly started before Dart was released.
- smizell 12y ago
  I think Blossom [1] switched to it. They had some articles on their blog about the switch [2]. [1] https://www.blossom.io/ https://www.blossom.io/ [2] http://www.ramen.io/post/46936028144/we-are-switching-to-dart-why http://www.ramen.io/post/46936028144/we-are-switching-to-dar...
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - tosh 12y ago
    Thanks for the mention (CEO here). We're super happy with Dart & really excited about polymer. Love the language & platform in general. We'll put out some essays, code snippets & lessons learned in the next few days :) Stay tuned.
- adrianlmm 12y ago
  I use Dart in production, it has its advatages like: 1.- It is better than JavaScript, is like using C# with a litle mix of Java. 2.- It comes with its own libraries, no more underscore.js or other patch libraries that JS needs, it is already in the toolkit. 3.- It comes with the Dart Editor, where you can debug your code easily, for scalable projects I find this to be invaluable. 4.- It will run in all your browsers, because it will export your code to JavaScript, but not only export it, it will optimize it and will run really fast. 5.- The pub library, go to pub.dartlang.org and you will find lots of packages that you can install and use, like a bootjack, a bootstrap port in Dart. There are prolly many more, but these are the ones that come to my head right now. But it also has its own problems like: 1.- No Dart support for Chrome yet and we don't know if there will ever be at this point. 2.- The generated JavaScript will be huge, and I mean huge, mine is like 460k per file and I'm not using polymer, when I used polymer the generated JavaScript was over one megabyte, just insane in the cloud. 3.- Get use to regressions, with every point update I've have issues, I upgraded from 1.4 to 1.5 two days ago, now my code is broken It runs, but it will for example run futures twice, So I went back to 1.4 for now, I had some other issues with UTF when migrating from 1.3 to 1.4 so, get use to. 4.- They are slow fixing bugs, looks like polymer and speed are their priorities, but when you need something trivial that other languajes have had for years and you report a bug it will get ignored, I've waited for 18 months and my open bugs are not fixed yet. I would say that Dart is nice and you should give it a chance.
  - GrandTheftR 12y ago
    Given the size of the generated JS file, do you find it is an issue?
    - adrianlmm 12y ago
      When you host your Project in the cloud and you pay for the bandwidth quota then you learn the value of small generated JavaScript, but if it is a Project where bandwidth does not generate a cost like an intranet or VPN, then it doesn't really matter.
  - u124556 12y ago
    Does it have anything like AngularJS?
- amartya916 12y ago
  Yup. At Sendbloom.co we have used Dart to build a tool that is used by sales people to send out email campaigns. The tool is inspired by quartz composer/Max MSP's interaction paradigms (drag-and-drop visual programming). As someone else mentioned, Dart code can be fairly verbose, but it is very readable and programming with it is a joy when compared to writing vanilla javascript/jquery. I'd be happy to answer if you have any other questions about Dart.
  - spankalee 12y ago
    I would love to see a demo of that! And how are you finding Dart to be verbose? In my experience it can be more concise than JS because of short lambdas, no function keyword, method cascades, real classes, the fluent Iterable and Stream interfaces. On the other hand, I see some Dart programmers use a lot of classes and type all their variables. I'm curious what ended up being verbose for you.
msie 12y ago
I was at last year's Google IO and a lot of people were asking the Dart representatives about whether Dart was going to be supported in Chrome (not just Chromium). We were told the team was holding off because of performance considerations. It has been ONE WHOLE YEAR since then.
- mda 12y ago
  There were changes needed on Blink side (Oilpan project) and this sort of things take time. Oilpan project: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YtfurcyKFS0hxPOnC3U6JJroM8aRP49Yf0QWznZ9jrk/mobilepresent#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YtfurcyKFS0hxPOnC3U6... You can track Darts's performance here: https://www.dartlang.org/performance/ https://www.dartlang.org/performance/
- comex 12y ago
  Why do you want it to be supported in Chrome? Any performance improvements seen by your users won't apply to those using any other browser.
  - rdtsc 12y ago
    > Any performance improvements seen by your users won't apply to those using any other browser. But it will apply to those using Chrome (their performance benchmarks show consistent improvement, sometimes up to 2x) and it will be using a better language for all the other ones.
  - Igglyboo 12y ago
    Because then his userbase goes from being an extremely small niche(chromium is probably less than 1%) to a much larger niche(chrome is more than 30%).
    - rational-future 12y ago
      Do you mean that Chromium now has a Dart VM? The last time I checked it didn't, there was a buggy thing called Dartium.
kasperset 12y ago
I would like to use it but Javascript Frameworks and libraries are being developed so rapidly that it gets difficult to choose Dart and plus it is yet to mature. I may be wrong.
- spankalee 12y ago
  Dart's been very stable for a while now, and has a really good library ecosystem already. Personally, I wouldn't worry too much about JavaScript frameworks evolving rapidly, just go with anything the supports Web Components. In JavaScript that would be Polymer, X-Tags or Bosonic. In Dart that's Polymer. Or, in either you can write directly to the platform APIs without a library. In my mind there is BWC and AWC: Before Web Components and After Web Components. The world or web apps is undergoing a paradigm shift on par with AJAX right now, and I wouldn't use any framework that doesn't support Web Components.
  - kasperset 12y ago
    I have been looking at Polymer library and it looks promising.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
gress 12y ago
Has this version been submitted to ECMA?
- munificent 12y ago
  Yes: http://news.dartlang.org/2014/02/standardizing-dart-1st-ecma-tc52.html http://news.dartlang.org/2014/02/standardizing-dart-1st-ecma...
caycep 12y ago
This may be a noob question on my part, but my understanding is Dart and Rust are 2 separate efforts to come up with something to supplant javascript?
- carlosdp 12y ago
  As in Mozilla Rust? That is a systems language, nothing to do with JS (other than it is being used to build Servo, Mozilla's experimental new parallel browser engine)
- pohl 12y ago
  While it's true that Dart is aimed at the sort of territory dominated by JavaScript (client-side code in the browser), Rust is instead aiming towards the sort of use cases one might choose C++ for today – for example, as the language used to create the browser itself.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- phn 12y ago
  I think rust wants to be a system language, akin to C rather than javascript. Dart, yes, a different language running inside the browser.
- josteink 12y ago
  No. Rust is a systems language meant to displace c and c++. Dart is Google's me-too attempt at creating something which compiles to JavaScript. It borrows heavily from java and generates equally bloated code. OK, so maybe last sentence is a bit over the top critical, but last I checked, hello world in dart rendered in at 100kb [1] of js and dependencies. [1] http://lostechies.com/jimmybogard/2011/10/12/the-dart-hello-world/ http://lostechies.com/jimmybogard/2011/10/12/the-dart-hello-...
  - gsnedders 12y ago
luos 12y ago
I tried dart just last week with dart IDE (1.4.3). It was good, much better than javascript. My observations: Installing dependencies was easy. Types help a lot. The IDE is good but sometimes can not show the correct type or just shows dynamic, the autocomplete is usable if you write `this.` . Usable for a modify-refresh cycle but the attached chromium seems to be a little buggy (on xubuntu the window is not correctly drawn). In-browser exceptions are a little cryptic to read. Very similar syntax to java/c#. Good stdlib (I tried async/browser/math). Little cumbersome calling JS but it works. Bult-in factory pattern, setters/getters. I think they could let users create multiline functions with the => operator (currently only one line). :) I tried to pub my code, but it did not work for some reasons. I haven't tried since then so I don't know what kind of js it generates.
munificent 12y ago
Hi! I'm on the Dart team. If you'd like, I'll try to answer any questions you have.
- msoad 12y ago
  Hi, I have two questions: 1. One big issue with JavaScript applications is that they are single threaded. Does Dart/Web Component platform provide any solution to this? 2. Will we see another UI rendering layer other than DOM for Dart?
  - munificent 12y ago
    > One big issue with JavaScript applications is that they are single threaded. Does Dart/Web Component platform provide any solution to this? Because Dart compiles to JavaScript, we're limited in some ways in what we can do here. We do, of course, support Web Workers, but those have a bunch of constraints that make them difficult to use in practice. We have tried to make single-threaded async programming more pleasant. In particular, Dart comes with built-in, very rich Future and Stream types. Even better, those are deeply integrated into the code libraries, including the DOM. Every asynchronous DOM operation in Dart returns a future, which is much more pleasant to deal with than raw callbacks. Likewise, things like events are exposed as streams, so you can map and transform them like any other stream of data. I gave a talk on Dart at Strange Loop last year[1] that talks a bit about this. Skip to around 38 minutes. > 2. Will we see another UI rendering layer other than DOM for Dart? Good question! There are a few different frameworks that people have built for Dart that expose their own ways of expressing UI. I think they all ultimately fall back to the DOM because that's the primitive the browser gives you, but what you as a programmer deal with may be fairly removed from that. These days, I mostly do command-line Dart stuff, so I don't have a good lay of the land here. [1]: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/dart-introduction http://www.infoq.com/presentations/dart-introduction
- pohl 12y ago
  Has there been much internal dogfooding, such that some external-facing thing I use is really powered by JavaScript that came out of dart2js? If I'm using GWT, should I be thinking about using Dart instead?
stesch 12y ago
I wouldn't use Dart until this bug is fixed: https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=13285 https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=13285
- jmesserly 12y ago
  fyi, I think most of my original complaints in that bug are either fixed, or largely mitigated. I don't think we've had any issues for over a year now (since Dart 1.0). I still wish it was even more bulletproof, but it isn't scary anymore like it was. Google is building lots of stuff in Dart too, so we're on the hook if something breaks.
  - stesch 12y ago
    Dart doesn't work correctly in Firefox 31 Beta. People will have to recompile all their Dart apps next month.
    - jmesserly 12y ago
      Wow, seriously? I've been using Beta and not noticed any breakage (but that doesn't mean there isn't any). Do you have any more context?
      - stesch 12y ago
        https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=19489 https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=19489
        bzbarsky 12y ago
        Ouch. It looks like Dart is using Blink's IDL, not the spec IDL, for generating bindings to JavaScript, so it's only really guaranteed to work in Blink...
pm90 12y ago
How does dart compare to coffeescript?
- munificent 12y ago
  This is a very simplified answer, but here's my take: CoffeeScript says that the main problems with JS are the inelegant C-style syntax and a few semantic trip wires. It addresses those while still keeping the underlying semantics, APIs and ecosystem. If what drives you up the wall about JS is stuff like the DOM, or JS's object model, CoffeeScript won't help you much. If you are OK with how JS behaves and like the very large JS ecosystem, CoffeeScript can be a nice fit. Dart takes a much larger semantic step away from JS. Syntactically, it's more similar to JS than CoffeeScript is. It sticks with braces and statements, and the whole C kit and kaboodle. However, semantically, it's much different. It has a full-featured class system with inheritance, mixins, getters, setters, operator overloading, etc. It has a static type system so you get the nice tooling experience you expect from a language like Java or C#. It also completely revamps the DOM APIs to (hopefully) be more rational, modern and consistent. The cost, though, is that interacting with the existing JavaScript world is a little more difficult. You can interop, of course, but it isn't as seamless as CoffeeScript.
WorldWideWayne 12y ago
I just don't trust Google to do languages and developer tools very well. They don't seem to depend on developers enough to bend over backwards for us the way that Microsoft does. Plus, they seem to want to use web tech to build native desktop tools all the time and little things like "keyboard acceleration" don't seem to matter to them because there are no standards for that in web-world.
- mythz 12y ago
  Not sure what you mean: MS has a history of abandoning its developer platforms and frameworks that thier developers have invested in, so much so that there's no longer a clear UI story for building native desktop windows apps, i.e. VB6, Silverlight, WinForms and WPF are all effectively deprecated. Although they have long support life, when they officially abandon a platform they also refuse to Open Source it so others can keep it alive (e.g. VB6 http://bit.ly/KPMUS6 http://bit.ly/KPMUS6). I personally can't see how anyone can put trust into building native Windows desktop apps (i.e. over web apps) given the repeated a history of abandonment. Even the #1 feature for VS.NET is to continue developing very popular XNA framework: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/filters/top http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi... Likewise on the server side there's been history of deprecated frameworks a lot of developers have invested a lot of energy into learning, e.g: .asmx, CSF, WCF, WCF/REST, WSE, WCF DataServices, RIA Whilst VisualStudio is a great IDE, I find it a subpar experience without R#. The major advantages Dart has over C# is that it still provides an enjoyable experience to develop even without an IDE which also includes support for the most popular text editors: https://www.dartlang.org/tools/ https://www.dartlang.org/tools/ If you like IDE and tooling support, the DartEditor offers a good experience with built-in analyzer, debugging and refactoring support you can expect from a well engineered language. By contrast, C#'s configuration model, msbuild project format, heavy frameworks and tooling makes it unfeasible to develop without an IDE. The other major advantage Dart has is that it compiles down to JS where even the compiler is completely self-hosting and runs inside a browser without plugins: http://try.dartlang.org/ http://try.dartlang.org/ Being able to share the same code on client and server and having a single integrated development full-stack experience is a huge win in re-usability and utility. Another killer feature is that the language and tooling is cross-platform which supports Windows, OSX and Linux. Something .NET devs often miss out on is the value and utility of being able to host apps on cost-effective Linux servers. Google continues to invest a tonne of resources in Dart and Polymer which are massive undertakings that are providing a much simplified and consistent experience for developing large, complex web apps. Nothing like Dart or Polymer exists. Dart is a platform that transpiles to JS, includes a native Dart VM, an entire toolchain including IDE, analyzer and debugger both in Dart Editor as well as in Chrome, in both the Dart VM as well as debugging with Source maps. The worlds best VM engineers work on the Dart VM, i.e. the same pedigree responsible for the StrongTalk VM that was later acquired by Sun to form the basis of the world-class Java Hotspot VM that later went on to develop V8, are now leading the development on the Dart VM. The excellence shows itself in the consistency and minimalism goals in the language, providing a productive, iterative dynamic language experience for fast prototyping with the benefit of static analysis with optional typing when scaling up to a maintainable, well-documented code-base (best of both worlds). Not only is Dart a productive dynamic language, it also has excellent performance, the best performance of all languages I benchmarked with a port of Peter Norvig's Sudoku solver: https://github.com/dartist/sudoku_solver#benchmarks https://github.com/dartist/sudoku_solver#benchmarks
dannyr 12y ago
Anybody knows if there's a free DART PDF Book somewhere?
- sethladd 12y ago
  Not sure about PDFs, but the text for Dart Up & Running can be found here: https://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and-running/ https://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and-running/ [disclaimer: I work for the Dart team, and I'm a coauthor of that book.]
- bluepill 12y ago
  I usually browse the docs when starting with a new topic; the dartlang website has tons of stuff (and the articles are usually kept up to date), it's quite easy to get started.
Rapzid 12y ago
Hello, golangs channels and go routines have been quite popular with some. So popular that the clojure guys created core.async and even adopted the "go" command(as a nod I'm assuming?). This works in the JVM via clojurescript.. Has the Dart team considered such a system? Was it brought up when planning the await stuff?
shakethemonkey 12y ago
It would give me greater confidence if the first Dart example[1] on the official Dart website did not point to a 404 Not Found. [1] https://www.dartlang.org/samples/ https://www.dartlang.org/samples/
- sethladd 12y ago
  Yikes! Not good. I just opened: https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=19708 https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=19708
  - sethladd 12y ago
    I fixed our repo. The next time we push the site, it should be fixed. Thanks for the report!
laughfactory 12y ago
I too would like to see a lot more work done on Dart web frameworks (particularly client side) and a lot more documentation/tutorials demonstrating non-trivial real applications which have a complex UI, data binding, and talk to a database on the backend. Right now it's the dearth of documentation/tutorials/books holding me back as I'm on the beginner end of the spectrum--but still very interested in Dart.

160 points by dboyd 12y ago

Is anybody using Dart for significant production code outside of Google? (Not mocking, genuinely curious to hear whats being done with it)

mda 12y ago
https://www.dartlang.org/community/who-uses-dart.html https://www.dartlang.org/community/who-uses-dart.html
- gsnedders 12y ago
  Surprisingly few Google properties on there, I must say. Yes, many most certainly have large existing code-bases, but that it doesn't include things like the new Google Maps (which, AIUI, has relatively little in common with the old version) seems… interesting.
  - spankalee 12y ago
    Google Maps was almost certainly started before Dart was released.
smizell 12y ago
I think Blossom [1] switched to it. They had some articles on their blog about the switch [2]. [1] https://www.blossom.io/ https://www.blossom.io/ [2] http://www.ramen.io/post/46936028144/we-are-switching-to-dart-why http://www.ramen.io/post/46936028144/we-are-switching-to-dar...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- tosh 12y ago
  Thanks for the mention (CEO here). We're super happy with Dart & really excited about polymer. Love the language & platform in general. We'll put out some essays, code snippets & lessons learned in the next few days :) Stay tuned.
adrianlmm 12y ago
I use Dart in production, it has its advatages like: 1.- It is better than JavaScript, is like using C# with a litle mix of Java. 2.- It comes with its own libraries, no more underscore.js or other patch libraries that JS needs, it is already in the toolkit. 3.- It comes with the Dart Editor, where you can debug your code easily, for scalable projects I find this to be invaluable. 4.- It will run in all your browsers, because it will export your code to JavaScript, but not only export it, it will optimize it and will run really fast. 5.- The pub library, go to pub.dartlang.org and you will find lots of packages that you can install and use, like a bootjack, a bootstrap port in Dart. There are prolly many more, but these are the ones that come to my head right now. But it also has its own problems like: 1.- No Dart support for Chrome yet and we don't know if there will ever be at this point. 2.- The generated JavaScript will be huge, and I mean huge, mine is like 460k per file and I'm not using polymer, when I used polymer the generated JavaScript was over one megabyte, just insane in the cloud. 3.- Get use to regressions, with every point update I've have issues, I upgraded from 1.4 to 1.5 two days ago, now my code is broken It runs, but it will for example run futures twice, So I went back to 1.4 for now, I had some other issues with UTF when migrating from 1.3 to 1.4 so, get use to. 4.- They are slow fixing bugs, looks like polymer and speed are their priorities, but when you need something trivial that other languajes have had for years and you report a bug it will get ignored, I've waited for 18 months and my open bugs are not fixed yet. I would say that Dart is nice and you should give it a chance.
- GrandTheftR 12y ago
  Given the size of the generated JS file, do you find it is an issue?
  - adrianlmm 12y ago
    When you host your Project in the cloud and you pay for the bandwidth quota then you learn the value of small generated JavaScript, but if it is a Project where bandwidth does not generate a cost like an intranet or VPN, then it doesn't really matter.
- u124556 12y ago
  Does it have anything like AngularJS?
amartya916 12y ago
Yup. At Sendbloom.co we have used Dart to build a tool that is used by sales people to send out email campaigns. The tool is inspired by quartz composer/Max MSP's interaction paradigms (drag-and-drop visual programming). As someone else mentioned, Dart code can be fairly verbose, but it is very readable and programming with it is a joy when compared to writing vanilla javascript/jquery. I'd be happy to answer if you have any other questions about Dart.
- spankalee 12y ago
  I would love to see a demo of that! And how are you finding Dart to be verbose? In my experience it can be more concise than JS because of short lambdas, no function keyword, method cascades, real classes, the fluent Iterable and Stream interfaces. On the other hand, I see some Dart programmers use a lot of classes and type all their variables. I'm curious what ended up being verbose for you.

msie 12y ago

I was at last year's Google IO and a lot of people were asking the Dart representatives about whether Dart was going to be supported in Chrome (not just Chromium). We were told the team was holding off because of performance considerations. It has been ONE WHOLE YEAR since then.

mda 12y ago
There were changes needed on Blink side (Oilpan project) and this sort of things take time. Oilpan project: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YtfurcyKFS0hxPOnC3U6JJroM8aRP49Yf0QWznZ9jrk/mobilepresent#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YtfurcyKFS0hxPOnC3U6... You can track Darts's performance here: https://www.dartlang.org/performance/ https://www.dartlang.org/performance/
comex 12y ago
Why do you want it to be supported in Chrome? Any performance improvements seen by your users won't apply to those using any other browser.
- rdtsc 12y ago
  > Any performance improvements seen by your users won't apply to those using any other browser. But it will apply to those using Chrome (their performance benchmarks show consistent improvement, sometimes up to 2x) and it will be using a better language for all the other ones.
- Igglyboo 12y ago
  Because then his userbase goes from being an extremely small niche(chromium is probably less than 1%) to a much larger niche(chrome is more than 30%).
  - rational-future 12y ago
    Do you mean that Chromium now has a Dart VM? The last time I checked it didn't, there was a buggy thing called Dartium.

kasperset 12y ago

I would like to use it but Javascript Frameworks and libraries are being developed so rapidly that it gets difficult to choose Dart and plus it is yet to mature. I may be wrong.

spankalee 12y ago
Dart's been very stable for a while now, and has a really good library ecosystem already. Personally, I wouldn't worry too much about JavaScript frameworks evolving rapidly, just go with anything the supports Web Components. In JavaScript that would be Polymer, X-Tags or Bosonic. In Dart that's Polymer. Or, in either you can write directly to the platform APIs without a library. In my mind there is BWC and AWC: Before Web Components and After Web Components. The world or web apps is undergoing a paradigm shift on par with AJAX right now, and I wouldn't use any framework that doesn't support Web Components.
- kasperset 12y ago
  I have been looking at Polymer library and it looks promising.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

gress 12y ago

Has this version been submitted to ECMA?

munificent 12y ago
Yes: http://news.dartlang.org/2014/02/standardizing-dart-1st-ecma-tc52.html http://news.dartlang.org/2014/02/standardizing-dart-1st-ecma...

caycep 12y ago

This may be a noob question on my part, but my understanding is Dart and Rust are 2 separate efforts to come up with something to supplant javascript?

carlosdp 12y ago
As in Mozilla Rust? That is a systems language, nothing to do with JS (other than it is being used to build Servo, Mozilla's experimental new parallel browser engine)
pohl 12y ago
While it's true that Dart is aimed at the sort of territory dominated by JavaScript (client-side code in the browser), Rust is instead aiming towards the sort of use cases one might choose C++ for today – for example, as the language used to create the browser itself.
deleted 12y ago
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deleted 12y ago
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phn 12y ago
I think rust wants to be a system language, akin to C rather than javascript. Dart, yes, a different language running inside the browser.
josteink 12y ago
No. Rust is a systems language meant to displace c and c++. Dart is Google's me-too attempt at creating something which compiles to JavaScript. It borrows heavily from java and generates equally bloated code. OK, so maybe last sentence is a bit over the top critical, but last I checked, hello world in dart rendered in at 100kb [1] of js and dependencies. [1] http://lostechies.com/jimmybogard/2011/10/12/the-dart-hello-world/ http://lostechies.com/jimmybogard/2011/10/12/the-dart-hello-...
- gsnedders 12y ago

luos 12y ago

I tried dart just last week with dart IDE (1.4.3). It was good, much better than javascript. My observations: Installing dependencies was easy. Types help a lot. The IDE is good but sometimes can not show the correct type or just shows dynamic, the autocomplete is usable if you write `this.` . Usable for a modify-refresh cycle but the attached chromium seems to be a little buggy (on xubuntu the window is not correctly drawn). In-browser exceptions are a little cryptic to read. Very similar syntax to java/c#. Good stdlib (I tried async/browser/math). Little cumbersome calling JS but it works. Bult-in factory pattern, setters/getters. I think they could let users create multiline functions with the => operator (currently only one line). :) I tried to pub my code, but it did not work for some reasons. I haven't tried since then so I don't know what kind of js it generates.

munificent 12y ago

Hi! I'm on the Dart team. If you'd like, I'll try to answer any questions you have.

msoad 12y ago
Hi, I have two questions: 1. One big issue with JavaScript applications is that they are single threaded. Does Dart/Web Component platform provide any solution to this? 2. Will we see another UI rendering layer other than DOM for Dart?
- munificent 12y ago
  > One big issue with JavaScript applications is that they are single threaded. Does Dart/Web Component platform provide any solution to this? Because Dart compiles to JavaScript, we're limited in some ways in what we can do here. We do, of course, support Web Workers, but those have a bunch of constraints that make them difficult to use in practice. We have tried to make single-threaded async programming more pleasant. In particular, Dart comes with built-in, very rich Future and Stream types. Even better, those are deeply integrated into the code libraries, including the DOM. Every asynchronous DOM operation in Dart returns a future, which is much more pleasant to deal with than raw callbacks. Likewise, things like events are exposed as streams, so you can map and transform them like any other stream of data. I gave a talk on Dart at Strange Loop last year[1] that talks a bit about this. Skip to around 38 minutes. > 2. Will we see another UI rendering layer other than DOM for Dart? Good question! There are a few different frameworks that people have built for Dart that expose their own ways of expressing UI. I think they all ultimately fall back to the DOM because that's the primitive the browser gives you, but what you as a programmer deal with may be fairly removed from that. These days, I mostly do command-line Dart stuff, so I don't have a good lay of the land here. [1]: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/dart-introduction http://www.infoq.com/presentations/dart-introduction
pohl 12y ago
Has there been much internal dogfooding, such that some external-facing thing I use is really powered by JavaScript that came out of dart2js? If I'm using GWT, should I be thinking about using Dart instead?

stesch 12y ago

I wouldn't use Dart until this bug is fixed: https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=13285 https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=13285

jmesserly 12y ago
fyi, I think most of my original complaints in that bug are either fixed, or largely mitigated. I don't think we've had any issues for over a year now (since Dart 1.0). I still wish it was even more bulletproof, but it isn't scary anymore like it was. Google is building lots of stuff in Dart too, so we're on the hook if something breaks.
- stesch 12y ago
  Dart doesn't work correctly in Firefox 31 Beta. People will have to recompile all their Dart apps next month.
  - jmesserly 12y ago
    Wow, seriously? I've been using Beta and not noticed any breakage (but that doesn't mean there isn't any). Do you have any more context?
    - stesch 12y ago
      https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=19489 https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=19489
      - bzbarsky 12y ago
        Ouch. It looks like Dart is using Blink's IDL, not the spec IDL, for generating bindings to JavaScript, so it's only really guaranteed to work in Blink...

pm90 12y ago

How does dart compare to coffeescript?

munificent 12y ago
This is a very simplified answer, but here's my take: CoffeeScript says that the main problems with JS are the inelegant C-style syntax and a few semantic trip wires. It addresses those while still keeping the underlying semantics, APIs and ecosystem. If what drives you up the wall about JS is stuff like the DOM, or JS's object model, CoffeeScript won't help you much. If you are OK with how JS behaves and like the very large JS ecosystem, CoffeeScript can be a nice fit. Dart takes a much larger semantic step away from JS. Syntactically, it's more similar to JS than CoffeeScript is. It sticks with braces and statements, and the whole C kit and kaboodle. However, semantically, it's much different. It has a full-featured class system with inheritance, mixins, getters, setters, operator overloading, etc. It has a static type system so you get the nice tooling experience you expect from a language like Java or C#. It also completely revamps the DOM APIs to (hopefully) be more rational, modern and consistent. The cost, though, is that interacting with the existing JavaScript world is a little more difficult. You can interop, of course, but it isn't as seamless as CoffeeScript.

WorldWideWayne 12y ago

I just don't trust Google to do languages and developer tools very well. They don't seem to depend on developers enough to bend over backwards for us the way that Microsoft does. Plus, they seem to want to use web tech to build native desktop tools all the time and little things like "keyboard acceleration" don't seem to matter to them because there are no standards for that in web-world.

mythz 12y ago
Not sure what you mean: MS has a history of abandoning its developer platforms and frameworks that thier developers have invested in, so much so that there's no longer a clear UI story for building native desktop windows apps, i.e. VB6, Silverlight, WinForms and WPF are all effectively deprecated. Although they have long support life, when they officially abandon a platform they also refuse to Open Source it so others can keep it alive (e.g. VB6 http://bit.ly/KPMUS6 http://bit.ly/KPMUS6). I personally can't see how anyone can put trust into building native Windows desktop apps (i.e. over web apps) given the repeated a history of abandonment. Even the #1 feature for VS.NET is to continue developing very popular XNA framework: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/filters/top http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi... Likewise on the server side there's been history of deprecated frameworks a lot of developers have invested a lot of energy into learning, e.g: .asmx, CSF, WCF, WCF/REST, WSE, WCF DataServices, RIA Whilst VisualStudio is a great IDE, I find it a subpar experience without R#. The major advantages Dart has over C# is that it still provides an enjoyable experience to develop even without an IDE which also includes support for the most popular text editors: https://www.dartlang.org/tools/ https://www.dartlang.org/tools/ If you like IDE and tooling support, the DartEditor offers a good experience with built-in analyzer, debugging and refactoring support you can expect from a well engineered language. By contrast, C#'s configuration model, msbuild project format, heavy frameworks and tooling makes it unfeasible to develop without an IDE. The other major advantage Dart has is that it compiles down to JS where even the compiler is completely self-hosting and runs inside a browser without plugins: http://try.dartlang.org/ http://try.dartlang.org/ Being able to share the same code on client and server and having a single integrated development full-stack experience is a huge win in re-usability and utility. Another killer feature is that the language and tooling is cross-platform which supports Windows, OSX and Linux. Something .NET devs often miss out on is the value and utility of being able to host apps on cost-effective Linux servers. Google continues to invest a tonne of resources in Dart and Polymer which are massive undertakings that are providing a much simplified and consistent experience for developing large, complex web apps. Nothing like Dart or Polymer exists. Dart is a platform that transpiles to JS, includes a native Dart VM, an entire toolchain including IDE, analyzer and debugger both in Dart Editor as well as in Chrome, in both the Dart VM as well as debugging with Source maps. The worlds best VM engineers work on the Dart VM, i.e. the same pedigree responsible for the StrongTalk VM that was later acquired by Sun to form the basis of the world-class Java Hotspot VM that later went on to develop V8, are now leading the development on the Dart VM. The excellence shows itself in the consistency and minimalism goals in the language, providing a productive, iterative dynamic language experience for fast prototyping with the benefit of static analysis with optional typing when scaling up to a maintainable, well-documented code-base (best of both worlds). Not only is Dart a productive dynamic language, it also has excellent performance, the best performance of all languages I benchmarked with a port of Peter Norvig's Sudoku solver: https://github.com/dartist/sudoku_solver#benchmarks https://github.com/dartist/sudoku_solver#benchmarks

dannyr 12y ago

Anybody knows if there's a free DART PDF Book somewhere?

sethladd 12y ago
Not sure about PDFs, but the text for Dart Up & Running can be found here: https://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and-running/ https://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and-running/ [disclaimer: I work for the Dart team, and I'm a coauthor of that book.]
bluepill 12y ago
I usually browse the docs when starting with a new topic; the dartlang website has tons of stuff (and the articles are usually kept up to date), it's quite easy to get started.

Rapzid 12y ago

Hello, golangs channels and go routines have been quite popular with some. So popular that the clojure guys created core.async and even adopted the "go" command(as a nod I'm assuming?). This works in the JVM via clojurescript.. Has the Dart team considered such a system? Was it brought up when planning the await stuff?

shakethemonkey 12y ago

It would give me greater confidence if the first Dart example[1] on the official Dart website did not point to a 404 Not Found. [1] https://www.dartlang.org/samples/ https://www.dartlang.org/samples/

sethladd 12y ago
Yikes! Not good. I just opened: https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=19708 https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=19708
- sethladd 12y ago
  I fixed our repo. The next time we push the site, it should be fixed. Thanks for the report!

laughfactory 12y ago

I too would like to see a lot more work done on Dart web frameworks (particularly client side) and a lot more documentation/tutorials demonstrating non-trivial real applications which have a complex UI, data binding, and talk to a database on the backend. Right now it's the dearth of documentation/tutorials/books holding me back as I'm on the beginner end of the spectrum--but still very interested in Dart.