Dart Bashing

http://dartinside.com/2011/dart-bashing/

by gbaygon • 15 years ago

36 18 15 years ago

chrisbuc• 15 years ago

Quite right too. Too much of what I've read on here and in the dart forums is "I thought it would be more like..." and "google have just created something to aid their development toolchain."

I view dart as javascript grown up. It's not that much different from java et al, but it's different enough.

Only time will tell if it will replace javascript, but I'll be doing my bit to help.

arctangent• 15 years ago

I will likely adopt Dart to replace all my client-side coding needs (but not just yet).

I was a little bit annoyed by the braces/semicolons on first glance but spent a few hours today reading the documentation and language reference etc.

It does seem like Dart is a "grown up" language, as you say. It's so packed full of goodies that it seems preferable to JavaScript in every way, except for the fact that JS is already here and has a large user base.

People who've invested a lot of time in learning how to make JS work might have a preference for sticking with what they know, but I think the general reaction today has been to place too much onus on the Dart team to say why it's better than JS.

It would be interesting to hear opinions from John Resig or Douglas Crockford. I'm hoping they're giving the matter some thought before weighing in on this, rather than just indifferent.

calebmpeterson2• 15 years ago

I’ve said this numerous times, and will do again, GUI is the next killer-app for actor programming.

As a full-time GUI developer (Java/SWT) this is so true it hurts. I would love to see the actor model and/or functional reactive programming become main-stream in this space. The observer pattern alone is insufficient...

scotth• 15 years ago

I'm having a little trouble imaging how the actor model would apply to GUI programming. Could you explain?

antrix• 15 years ago

I guess the issue is that making thread-safe GUIs is incredibly hard. So all GUI frameworks require you to update the GUI state only in the 'GUI thread'. Which means we use hacks like 'runOnMainThread', etc. to update the GUI.

A saner way is to implement an event bus and send update events to it letting the main thread update itself from the bus. Some frameworks do use this model but really, it would be much nicer if the language itself could do this.

calebmpeterson2• 15 years ago

Certainly.

First, the actor model need not imply a separate thread/process for each actor. It's quite possible and in fact common (in Scala's built-in actor library and various Java actor libraries) to run a very large 100k pool of actors in a pool of well under 100 threads. [1] So, the typical notion of having a single UI thread can mesh quite well with actors (just have the UI event loop pump each actor's event loop during idle).

Second, since actors process messages - which are conceptually the same as events - an actor has messages pushed to it by widget(s) upon user interaction. (If this sounds identical to the observer pattern, it's because it is). There's nothing interesting about this step other than the "an event is a message" concept.

Third, and this is the really neat part, actors often involve some concept of blocking on a receive() call - which is an inversion of control from the observer pattern. That is to say an observer/listener is invoked by the UI framework when an event occurs, but an actor, which conceptually has its own message/event loop, can consume events at will. Thus the inversion of control.

So your classic listener looks like this:

  // Added via $("#foo").click() or some such...
  function onClick(e) {
    // do something ... any state must be stored external to this callback
  }

But an actor looks like this:

  // The event loop is started up and pumps indefinitely...
  function loop() {
    // any state is local
    while (running) {
      switch (receive()) {
        case ....
      }
    }
  }

The event loop in an actor can easily turn into a very tight and explicit state machine. [2] My event loop here is pretty boring, but consider, if after receiving event A, you explicitly block on receive for event B.

I posted [2] a while back and there was a decent discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2972581. The section 5 of [2] really describe the idea neatly.

Hope that helps. Please let me know where I left things fuzzy.

1. Actors That Unify Threads and Events - http://lamp.epfl.ch/~phaller/doc/haller07coord.pdf

2. Deprecating The Observer Pattern - http://lamp.epfl.ch/~imaier/pub/DeprecatingObserversTR2010.p...

mohamedsa• 15 years ago

Any information on how actors compare to CSP/Channels in that regard? I guess they'd offer similar power but there might be some subtle advantages of one over another.

I made a language for teaching programming to kids that uses CSP as a basis for the GUI where each event is a channel, so I'm quite interested in any literature in this area.

sciurus• 15 years ago

This was written on October 8th, before much information was available about Dart.

Semiapies• 15 years ago

Every post on this blog appears to be this guy fanboying about Dart with next to no information on it.

Something smells, here.

languagehacker• 15 years ago

Leave it to the guy who finds any excuse possible to talk about how great Erlang is to create a perceived controversy for a new programming language so he can defend it -- and, tangentially, Erlang.

Dart actually looks pretty good, and since it can be compiled into JavaScript, there's no real risk in giving it a shot other than the obvious lack of user libraries, at this point. If Dart solves problems JavaScript has without introducing its own laundry list of wonky inconsistencies, then it's definitely worth developing with and participating in.

wbhart3• 15 years ago

Douglas Crockford details a pile of problems with Javascript that have plagued it since the year zero. Dart needs to fix all these issues. Moreover Google really pitched it as a better language than Javascript.

So far the Dart implementors don't even implement their spec correctly and some of the completely broken things in Javascript have been retained. And some new ones have been added too.

I'm absolutely stupified that their spec claims integers are not limited to 32 or 64 bits but only limited by the size of memory on the machine. Not only is that not true (they've just used the completely broken Javascript double precision floats), but it isn't even sensible. You cannot make bignums anywhere near as efficient as machine words.

They've even thrown away some of the really brilliant things in Javascript. It's a total disaster. The spec is full of typos too. This is not a hackish attempt of some inexperienced computer science graduate student, it is a language developed by one of the richest corporations on earth.

Regarding the fact that Dart has Null pointers, someone on Reddit commented "what were they smoking".

Someone commented on HN that Google does not hire programming language theory experts. I wish I could vote that up a hundred times.

Peaker2• 15 years ago

You can make bignums pretty close to the efficiency of machine words -- when storing values that fit in machine words. You do that by simply using tagged machine words.

A few extra instructions protecting the bignum's use do not have a significant cost.

In http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-... Tim Sweeney says:

  Factoid: C# exposes more than 10 integer-like data types,
  none of which are those defined by (Pythagoras, 500BC).

  In the future, can we get integers right

  Neat Trick:
  In a machine word (size 2^n), encode an integer ±2^(n-1)
  or a pointer to a variable-precision integer
  § Thus “small” integers carry no storage cost
  § Additional access cost is ~5 CPU instructions
  But:
  § A natural number bounded so as to index into an active array is
  guaranteed to fit within the machine word size (the array is the
  proof of this!) and thus requires no special encoding.
  § Since ~80% of integers can dependently-typed to access
  into an array, the amortized cost is ~1 CPU instruction
  per integer operation.

  This could be a viable tradeoff.

wbhart3• 15 years ago

In fact I've implemented precisely that first tradeoff in a library and it isn't too bad. It's still much slower than machine words though.

In Dart this becomes more constrained as it uses dynamic typing. Apparently the types specified by the programmer will be thrown away when it is compiled down to VM instructions. They are only used to specify/check interfaces.

What this means is that those tags become quite large in the implementation. You can try any Common Lisp or Scheme R6RS without type inference to see how fast or slow this is in practice.

I don't completely understand the second trick. Where are the bignums?

gruseom• 15 years ago

Don't know if this is Dart bashing, but... Java with actors? An emphatic no thank you. I fear these guys are committing the perennial mistake of designing a language for someone other than themselves - as always, for someone more average than themselves [†] - and are following Java's example in this respect as well. Personally, I don't want to program in PL/I.

The Go guys seem to have gone the opposite route, designing the C successor they themselves most want. That's far more likely to please others in the long run.

[†] Edit: someone misunderstood me here. I'm not advocating this supercilious attitude, I'm saying it's a mistake that leads to worse languages.

wavephorm• 15 years ago

I think it's more general 'Google-bashing'. Developers have every right to be extremely cautious about adopting any new developer tools from Google.

Anyone who's used GAE has been badly burned, if not deceived by Google. Many unpopular, or costly API's were revoked unceremoniously. It is not easy to understand Google's intentions because they never seem entirely genuine or devoted to anything. This fly by night attitude is not acceptable for a tools developer. Developers want to trust people that are dedicated to their work. And I just never get this attitude from Google.

sambeau• 15 years ago

From what I have seen that is not the case. You can't just dismiss the many informed opinions you see on here as 'Google bashing'.

I've seen many really good reasons for thinking that the web programming community hoped for something lighter and more innovative from Google.

There are many good reasons why most of us avoid web-programming in Java and C#, especially those of us in smaller shops where one person might have to tackle the full stack.

Dart Bashing

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