15 ms·

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 Chromiu

by 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.
    - gsnedders 12y ago
      Dartium is still separate to Chromium.
  - munificent 12y ago
    Dart -- without being in Chrome -- has the same userbase as CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, or any other language that also compiles to JavaScript. There are some real potential wins with being in Chrome, many of which are political, but there are no technical reasons for not being in Chrome to block Dart's adoption.
    - Igglyboo 12y ago
      Except Dart isn't trying to be another "compiles to javascript" language like CS, Dart is trying to completely replace js which is why it's so much more difficult to implement. They have to build an entire VM to rival V8.
      - spankalee 12y ago
        The point is that if you write in Dart you still have a very large target audience without the VM. Sure, Dart's designed to have even more benefit when run in it's own VM, but that doesn't affect its reach.
- adrianlmm 12y ago
  I will say that you won't need to rely on JavaScript, .dart files size are a lot smaller and the code starts and execute faster.
- ahoge 12y ago
  > Any performance improvements seen by your users won't apply to those using any other browser. It will be still about as fast as regular JavaScript.
higherpurpose 12y ago
Chrome already comes with NaCl which nobody else but Google uses it. Do we want another VM inside Chrome that nobody else will adopt? And now they're putting Android inside ChromeOS, too, just because they don't want to admit Android itself would work better on notebooks (given the right interface) than ChromeOS.
rwallace 12y ago
I'd much rather they keep holding off. We've had more than enough of big companies fragmenting the ecosystem by making their own languages, file formats etc. because they can. As things currently stand, Dart compiles to JavaScript, which is exactly the right way to do it; that way it's a tool that's available if you want to use it, but it doesn't screw up interoperability.
- macspoofing 12y ago
  >As things currently stand, Dart compiles to JavaScript, which is exactly the right way to do it That was never going to change. The idea, as far as I understand it, is for Dart to be executed natively where there is a Dart VM. Where there isn't, the dart2js output would be executed. The DOM itself would be unchanged. I think that's reasonable. In fact, more than reasonable, that's just a good idea.
  - azakai 12y ago
    The danger is that the VM has different semantics (for example, integer overflow) than dart2js code. If the same dart code sometimes runs in JS and sometimes in the dart VM, people are going to hit weird bugs. Also, if it is possible to ship dart code by itself - without the JS fallback - then we are going to see sites that don't bother with the JS fallback, and those sites are only going to work in chrome. For both of those reasons, the dart VM is somewhat worrying from the perspective of the openness of the web.
    - macspoofing 12y ago
      A lot of those objections could have been applied to SPDY, a protocol google developed unilaterally and initially was only supported in Chrome and Google sites. The end result was that everybody else got a regular experience while Google Service <-> Chrome users got a better one. Other sites started including SPDY, and then browsers got in on it as well. Seemed to have worked out well. I don't see how Dart would be any different. You can cook up worst-case hypothetical scenarios in which Dart-only sites exist because the developer was OK with cutting off half his customers, and was too lazy to generate the js output (it's not like there are vendor-specific prefixes, and even technologies like WebGL, or WebRTC that don't work universally in all browsers). >For both of those reasons, the dart VM is somewhat worrying from the perspective of the openness of the web. In the absolute "worst" case, Dart (an ECMA standardized language at that point) becomes very popular and forces other vendors to include a Dart VM. I'm willing to live in such a world. More likely, Dart becomes a complement to JavaScript when it comes to building RIAs in the browser (because JS is really really bad when it comes to writing and maintaining big codebases), though JS still reigns as King of the Web.

by msie 12y ago

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.
  - gsnedders 12y ago
    Dartium is still separate to Chromium.
- munificent 12y ago
  Dart -- without being in Chrome -- has the same userbase as CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, or any other language that also compiles to JavaScript. There are some real potential wins with being in Chrome, many of which are political, but there are no technical reasons for not being in Chrome to block Dart's adoption.
  - Igglyboo 12y ago
    Except Dart isn't trying to be another "compiles to javascript" language like CS, Dart is trying to completely replace js which is why it's so much more difficult to implement. They have to build an entire VM to rival V8.
    - spankalee 12y ago
      The point is that if you write in Dart you still have a very large target audience without the VM. Sure, Dart's designed to have even more benefit when run in it's own VM, but that doesn't affect its reach.
adrianlmm 12y ago
I will say that you won't need to rely on JavaScript, .dart files size are a lot smaller and the code starts and execute faster.
ahoge 12y ago
> Any performance improvements seen by your users won't apply to those using any other browser. It will be still about as fast as regular JavaScript.

higherpurpose 12y ago

Chrome already comes with NaCl which nobody else but Google uses it. Do we want another VM inside Chrome that nobody else will adopt? And now they're putting Android inside ChromeOS, too, just because they don't want to admit Android itself would work better on notebooks (given the right interface) than ChromeOS.

rwallace 12y ago

I'd much rather they keep holding off. We've had more than enough of big companies fragmenting the ecosystem by making their own languages, file formats etc. because they can. As things currently stand, Dart compiles to JavaScript, which is exactly the right way to do it; that way it's a tool that's available if you want to use it, but it doesn't screw up interoperability.

macspoofing 12y ago
>As things currently stand, Dart compiles to JavaScript, which is exactly the right way to do it That was never going to change. The idea, as far as I understand it, is for Dart to be executed natively where there is a Dart VM. Where there isn't, the dart2js output would be executed. The DOM itself would be unchanged. I think that's reasonable. In fact, more than reasonable, that's just a good idea.
- azakai 12y ago
  The danger is that the VM has different semantics (for example, integer overflow) than dart2js code. If the same dart code sometimes runs in JS and sometimes in the dart VM, people are going to hit weird bugs. Also, if it is possible to ship dart code by itself - without the JS fallback - then we are going to see sites that don't bother with the JS fallback, and those sites are only going to work in chrome. For both of those reasons, the dart VM is somewhat worrying from the perspective of the openness of the web.
  - macspoofing 12y ago
    A lot of those objections could have been applied to SPDY, a protocol google developed unilaterally and initially was only supported in Chrome and Google sites. The end result was that everybody else got a regular experience while Google Service <-> Chrome users got a better one. Other sites started including SPDY, and then browsers got in on it as well. Seemed to have worked out well. I don't see how Dart would be any different. You can cook up worst-case hypothetical scenarios in which Dart-only sites exist because the developer was OK with cutting off half his customers, and was too lazy to generate the js output (it's not like there are vendor-specific prefixes, and even technologies like WebGL, or WebRTC that don't work universally in all browsers). >For both of those reasons, the dart VM is somewhat worrying from the perspective of the openness of the web. In the absolute "worst" case, Dart (an ECMA standardized language at that point) becomes very popular and forces other vendors to include a Dart VM. I'm willing to live in such a world. More likely, Dart becomes a complement to JavaScript when it comes to building RIAs in the browser (because JS is really really bad when it comes to writing and maintaining big codebases), though JS still reigns as King of the Web.