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> That's me disliking a set of bad arguments, not me disliking Dart. I stand corrected. Yes, I've read all the memos and watched all the videos, including this

> That's me disliking a set of bad arguments, not me disliking Dart. I stand corrected. Yes, I've read all the memos and watched all the videos, including this one when I knew Dart wasn't going to make it into Chrome for the first time. I knew it by Blink engineering lead Darin Fischer's reaction when asked about Dart [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlJob8K_OwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlJob8K_OwE at 17:25] To me it looked like he laughed and sort of scoffed, then he and another member talked Dart down. Maybe it is a failing of mine to look at emotional content when considering issues, but doing so sometimes imparts useful information. At one point I was passionate about Dart because I thought it hit the sweet spot between JavaScript and Java applets in the browser with optional typing and generics. It turns out TypeScript hit that spot well enough and Anders was right about that. I understand your frustrations about opportunity costs and lost effort that could have gone into JavaScript, but there is another possibility -- and this is just my opinion, which I voiced at the time -- that the Dart team was more focused on Dart on the server as a Java replacement. This was at a time when Oracle's lawsuit with Google over the Java interfaces was a big question. I thought Dart might be a plan B on the server and why Dart2js was not getting the attention I thought it deserved. The JavaScript output on the client was unreadable, very large and much of the disdain for Dart from JavaScript devs was for this reason (17000 lines for a "hello world" if I recall correctly - I am not a systems guy but isn't most of that the DartVM translated to JS. Couldn't it be compiled to asm.js and loaded ahead of time if so desired?) I think we agree on most of this and I apologize. It wasn't my intention to offend you. Dart still has a chance if they can get the translator to ES6 to work, and I don't see why not, so I hope to use Dart when and where it makes sense.

BrendanEich 11y ago
Thanks for the reply and apols -- no hard feelings. At least the new Dart compiler generates nice JS, and the future efforts on Dart and JS look more aligned. We still don't have a bignum champion in TC39, but we do have great SIMD championing from John McCutchan (who started it) and Daniel Ehrenberg of Google; Dan Gohman of Mozilla; Peter Jensen, et al., of Intel; and others at Microsoft whose names I'm not remembering. This leads to value types as an extension mechanism, so we should get bignums sooner or later. On whether DartVM was justified as a hedge against Java going away on Google, I've heard that too, but both for Java on the Google server side and for Android Java, I have never seen any evidence to support this notion. I'd want to see an efficient AOT compiler from Java classfiles to Dart, for example. Another example: some convincing work on library/framework parity on the server side to go along with Dart's (very nice) DOM and client side libraries. Perhaps such work was kept behind firewalls. If instead it was just a case of saying "oh, we may be able to use DartVM if things go south with Oracle", that velleity hardly counts as an intentional, operational Java replacement strategy.

BrendanEich 11y ago

Thanks for the reply and apols -- no hard feelings. At least the new Dart compiler generates nice JS, and the future efforts on Dart and JS look more aligned. We still don't have a bignum champion in TC39, but we do have great SIMD championing from John McCutchan (who started it) and Daniel Ehrenberg of Google; Dan Gohman of Mozilla; Peter Jensen, et al., of Intel; and others at Microsoft whose names I'm not remembering. This leads to value types as an extension mechanism, so we should get bignums sooner or later. On whether DartVM was justified as a hedge against Java going away on Google, I've heard that too, but both for Java on the Google server side and for Android Java, I have never seen any evidence to support this notion. I'd want to see an efficient AOT compiler from Java classfiles to Dart, for example. Another example: some convincing work on library/framework parity on the server side to go along with Dart's (very nice) DOM and client side libraries. Perhaps such work was kept behind firewalls. If instead it was just a case of saying "oh, we may be able to use DartVM if things go south with Oracle", that velleity hardly counts as an intentional, operational Java replacement strategy.