"Hello World" in Dart, compiled to JavaScript

https://gist.github.com/1277224

by brodd • 15 years ago

272 137 15 years ago

gist.github.com

stephenr5• 15 years ago

So, something that lets people who don't understand JavaScript "compile" some other language into JavaScript, is horribly inefficient. Wow, what a surprise.

Ralith• 15 years ago

Do you mean to imply that the point of Dart is to be an easier to understand Javascript?

stephenr5• 15 years ago

Not at all. I'm saying if you want to make web apps that use JavaScript, write JavaScript.

beatpanda• 15 years ago

I don't understand why Dart is supposed to be good, someone please explain it to me like I'm an eight-year-old

KeithMajhor• 15 years ago

It's not right now. It's a lousy CoffeeScript. The thing that makes dart good is that it could, some day, have it's own runtime. Also, the language is being designed by the team that did v8. So I'd imagine they plan to build support into chrome at some point.

rayiner4• 15 years ago

I agree CoffeeScript has nicer syntax, but it retains all of Javascript's semantic warts. Whatever quibbles you might have about Dart's syntax (it's young yet!) it's semantics are much nicer than Javascript.

masklinn2• 15 years ago

> I don't understand why Dart is supposed to be good

It's like Go: "It's from google, so awesome by default".

uriel3• 15 years ago

Go is awesome by default because of Ken Thompson, not because of Google.

tiles• 15 years ago

I wonder if the only speed benefits that the Dart VM gives would be able to be beaten out by a smart compiler. I know this is early for the cross-compilation code (it doesn't trim out anything it doesn't need here), but I hope this isn't what is ultimately used in that comparison.

josephg2• 15 years ago

As I understand it, dart isn't trying to be a faster javascript. Its trying to be a better GWT.

Many googlers I've spoken to firmly believe that you need a strongly typed, OO language with good tooling to be able to develop any large application. They believe web apps are no exception.

Google has worked hard adding types to javascript with the closure compiler. But, there are limits to what you can achieve using javascript.

Comfortable programming in the large is the main value proposition of Dart. Expect to see good developer tools, debuggers, profilers and server-side runtime environments for Dart appearing over the next few years.

(Disclaimer: I don't share this view)

gruseom• 15 years ago

dart isn't trying to be a faster javascript.

It isn't trying to be a javascript, but it's certainly trying to be faster. Performance features prominently in every statement of their design goals. Not only that, but performance in all modern browsers - i.e. including the ones they don't control and won't ship with a Dart VM. I don't see how they can possibly pull that off. Can anybody?

uriel3• 15 years ago

> Many googlers I've spoken to firmly believe that you need a strongly typed

Dart might be many things, none of them come remotely close to _strongly typed_.

Also, I never understood why Google ever started GWT, the idea itself is like a bad Apr 1st joke that got out of hand. I guess that the legions of Java programmers google has been hiring have started to take over sigh

rayiner4• 15 years ago

The Dart VM buys you sane numeric semantics (integers and floats and bignums). Dart is also quite a bit less dynamic and introspective than JS, which should make it easier to optimize.

korny• 15 years ago

Wow. Reminds me of GWT...

chii• 15 years ago

you say that like GWT is somehow bad!

I think GWT is a great piece of tech. To be honest, google has way too much NiH syndrome, even internally...

uriel3• 15 years ago

I still have trouble understanding how anyone can take something like GWT seriously.

Whole books could be written about everything that is wrong with GWT, but here is one post that barely scratches the surface: http://ryandoherty.net/2007/04/29/why-google-web-toolkit-rot...

mhansen• 15 years ago

While this is hilarious, it's exactly fair. Dart is still in a very early tech preview, and they clearly haven't optimised code generation yet.

Right now, it's probably designed to be run through something like Closure Compiler, which removes dead code and minimizes the output.

swannodette6• 15 years ago

I'll repeat what I said in the GitHub thread:

There's this interesting tool called Google Closure Compiler. It does dead code elimination. https://gist.github.com/1277285

Notice that this source is now 2000 lines of pretty printed JS. Given that anything interesting these days uses jQuery or Underscore.js clientside, and similar things serverside, this amount of JS for even Hello World is standard fare.

EDIT: To be clear, I don't really give two hoots about Dart ... yet. I use ClojureScript and since ClojureScript ships with a similarly rich API / data structure set, Google Closure Compiler is essential to keeping code size down.

geoffhill• 15 years ago

I'm sorry, but 2,300 lines of code is in no way acceptable as a "dead code"-eliminated Hello World program. Not by a longshot.

swannodette6• 15 years ago

What language do you program in where the dependencies are not as heavy as they are here? The only difference I can tell is that it's hidden from you.

tolmasky4• 15 years ago

If all you use javascript for is console.log("Hello World"); then v8 will seem unnecessarily large too.

If all you do is one DOM transformation then jquery will seem huge compared to just doing it by hand (probably hundreds or thousands of lines of code vs 3).

I guess at this point I'm just repeating the OP, but this is simply in no way demonstrative of Dart. It can at best serve as a learning tool of the internals (and perhaps there are valid criticisms once you look at those), but any conclusion on code size is very flawed from this one example.

kelnos• 15 years ago

  $ cat hello.c 
  int main() { printf("Hello, world!\n"); }
  $ gcc hello.c
  $ ls -l a.out 
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 brian  staff   8.5K Oct 11 02:23 a.out*

And that's compiled code! And it also links to libc! But then again, any JS program requires tons of compiled C/C++ code to run.

dextorious2• 15 years ago

Do you even understand programming? It includes the runtime, dammnit.

A C hello world (#include "stdio.h", int main(void){printf("Hello World\n"); return 0; }) produces an 8K executable on my Mac.

8K --you know, they used to write whole games in 8K.

stephenr5• 15 years ago

Oh yeah, 2300 lines of gibberish JS and FSM only knows how many global variables and functions is a real improvement.

the original example should "compile" to nothing more than the following:

(function () { window.HelloDartTest = { testMain: function testMain() { console.log("Hello, Darter!"); } };

HelloDartTest.testMain(); })();

tolmasky4• 15 years ago

This is false. It is like claiming that it "should" really compile to just console.log("Hello,Darter!"); They're functionally equivalent so why not right?

Dart was designed for big apps. Google is not aiming at optimizing all the Hello World pages. Every single framework in existence has terrible size characteristics for Hello, World. Loading all of Foundation and UIKit for showing Hello World on the screen in iOS? It SHOULD just magically know to compile to the few commands that show the one text string right? No, that would be a waste of time optimization.

Now, if we start writing big apps in this thing and they are also bloated compared to their JavaScript equivalents then I will agree 100% that there is a problem. But there are just no worthwhile conclusions from the HelloWorld app regarding size. The only worthwhile conclusions are from the high level perspective, aka "how easy is it to write a hello world app".

tripzilch5• 15 years ago

If it's 2kloc for dead code eliminated "Hello World", how much would be left of that to eliminate when you actually write a program that does something?

Because I'm assuming once your program starts doing more complex things it'll actually need the rest of those 170kloc and be able to eliminate a lot less, right?

While if you make a complex program that uses basic jQuery, jQuery stays the same size.

josephg2• 15 years ago

I compiled that code with the google closure compiler. I used advanced optimisations for dead code removal.

The result is 94% smaller - 32k, or 9k gzipped. A 32k overhead could be absorbed by most large web applications without being noticed.

http://closure-compiler.appspot.com/code/jscd4ddca10c0a518fc...

vrotaru• 15 years ago

They obviously embed into the emitted javascript the whole Dart runtime. Whether it is needed or not.

cubicle677• 15 years ago

same code in coffeescript (@ preceding testMain makes it a static method and it looks like print in Dart converts to console.log)

    class HelloCoffeeTest
      @testMain: -> 
        console.log "Hello, Coffee!"
    
    HelloCoffeeTest.testMain()

resulting js

    var HelloCoffeeTest;
    HelloCoffeeTest = (function() {
      function HelloCoffeeTest() {}
      HelloCoffeeTest.testMain = function() {
        return console.log("Hello, Coffee!");
      };
      return HelloCoffeeTest;
    })();

    HelloCoffeeTest.testMain();

swannodette6• 15 years ago

Does CoffeeScript have all these data structures, http://www.dartlang.org/docs/api/index.html?

DanielRibeiro2• 15 years ago

You can always import JS.Class: http://jsclass.jcoglan.com/

cubicle677• 15 years ago

That's a long list, so probably not. Does Dart have an existential operator?[0]

    zip = lottery.drawWinner?().address?.zipcode

Hey look, I know they're not really comparable. They're solving different problems, are at different stages in maturity and have a different philosophy on how to do things. I also think that Hello World is probably the worst way to compare any two languages, but it's a fun exercise anyway

[0] example code from http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script

rayiner4• 15 years ago

CoffeeScript is meant to be synaptic sugar on top of JS. Dart is a language with different semantics that happens to compile to JS. As such it includes a lot of runtime code. More appropriate examples would be Emscripten, Parenscript, or ClojureScript.

ootachi6• 15 years ago

There is a legitimate point here though. If I'm a developer working on a new project, and I'm dissatisfied with JavaScript, I have a couple of options. I could try Dart, which will cost me a significant amount of performance in all browsers that aren't Chrome, or I could go with CoffeeScript, which will have good performance in all browsers (including Chrome, since Chrome will be forced by the other browser manufacturers to keep its engine up-to-date). For me that'd be an easy choice, unless one of three things happens:

(1) Dart's performance is so much better than that of JavaScript that it's worth sacrificing performance in every other browser to get hugely better performance in Chrome. That seems unlikely to me, but maybe it's possible.

(2) Chrome ends up with 90%+ market share, so it doesn't matter that I'm bad in all the other browsers. But I can't see this happening as long as e.g. iOS is around and relevant.

(3) I have the resources to write both a Dart version for Chrome and a CoffeeScript version for older browsers. At this point, Google has strictly made my life harder than it would have been otherwise.

I do want to give Dart a fair shake, but I'm having a hard time seeing how it could realistically succeed.

wlievens• 15 years ago

> synaptic sugar

Is this a typo, tongue-in-cheek, or a technical term I don't know? I've only heard of "syntactic sugar" myself.

azakai• 15 years ago

> CoffeeScript is meant to be synaptic sugar on top of JS. Dart is a language with different semantics that happens to compile to JS. As such it includes a lot of runtime code. More appropriate examples would be Emscripten, Parenscript, or ClojureScript.

I think you are correct here. But there is still something very worrying about what Dart compiles into. It isn't just the amount of code, which is what most people are discussing. It's the content too.

The content of the code makes it look like much of that code will be run all the time. In other words, it isn't just some library functions that are called rarely, it is stuff that will end up being called from your inner loops. I might be wrong here, but that's what the code suggests to me.

In that respect, the Dart compiler looks different from both CoffeeScript and Emscripten. CoffeeScript by design compiles into straightforward JS, and Emscripten manages to compile into mostly-straightforward JS as well, which is why it has decent performance. But what Dart compiles into looks like it would not run very fast on most JS engines. It might run fast on Chrome, if they tune its inlining and other capabilities for Dart-like code, but I doubt that would hold anywhere else.

Again, though, I have not profiled the generated code, I just took a look at it, so I might be wrong.

drgath• 15 years ago

Funny. But to be fair, a Hello World in C compiles to a 27k binary. Yeah yeah, optimize this, leave out that and you can get it smaller. Still doesn't change the fact that Hello World is not the target use-case for either C or Dart. Dart is intended for very large applications (compared to JS), so the additional weight for includes isn't that big of a deal.

It also doesn't change the fact that Dart sucks. For other reasons though.

riya• 15 years ago

hbgh

wes-exp• 15 years ago

On 32-bit Linux GCC, C hello world comes out to only 7 KB. Without optimization.

mkopinsky• 15 years ago

Just as a datapoint (I did this test before seeing the comment), in 32-bit cygwin a hello world written in C compiled to 12KB. In C++, it compiled to 497KB.

sjs2• 15 years ago

As me1000 (Randy Luecke) says Dart is not meant for hello world. If you run this through closure-compiler it's reduced to 2000 lines which is nothing next to Underscore, jQuery, Dojo, etc.

We all know the benefits of offloading code to a well known and well tested library or framework, especially if you're writing an app that is thousands of lines anyway. How is this contentious at the end of 2011 unless you're just hating Dart for the sake of it?

I haven't looked into the language yet and unless you haven't either let's all refrain from judgements based on this silly metric alone. Circle jerks and knee-jerk reactions are for Reddit, not HN.

Don't get me started on the whining about math performance. Reminds me of dinosaurs whining about how assembly is better than C is better than Java is better than.... There is more to software development than math. Crazy, new fangled, inefficient languages eat the lunch of older languages every single time. You have to be insane to pull out that gem. If math is your bottleneck then don't use Dart, if you know that math is your bottleneck then you shouldn't have to be told this! Sorry for the rant but half of the complaints I've read about Dart are utterly ridiculous, and speculative to boot.

chrisohara2• 15 years ago

..and here's the jsperf for the --optimize'd hello world vs. vanilla JS - http://jsperf.com/dart-hello-world-test-with-optimize/2. 17k vs. 4M for me

sjs2• 15 years ago

Got any useful benchmarks? Nobody is wondering which language to write their next "hello world" app in.

Just for the record I'm not saying Dart is amazing and everyone should use it, all I'm saying is that we should evaluate it objectively. If raw speed is your bottleneck then why are you wasting time evaluating Dart? Nobody is forcing anyone to use it, you can ignore it and move on with your day.

swannodette6• 15 years ago

...and your benchmark makes no sense. You're creating the entire Dart environment every time.

masklinn2• 15 years ago

> If you run this through closure-compiler it's reduced to 2000 lines which is nothing next to Underscore [...]

Underscore is under 1000 lines unminified and with all comments.

akrymski• 15 years ago

In general I do agree with you, but there's also some truth to the argument that statically linking only the required dependencies is better than embedding a VM. In a way, this is the difference between CoffeeScript and Dart for client side programming. Sure when your app is really large you'll probably end up with the same thing, but for smaller apps "compiling" should mean "including only the necessary stuff" which CoffeeScript successfully does.

I do have an issue with this trend of building VMs on top of VMs, abstracting further and further away to the point where we're using 1000 times more CPU cycles than in the 80s to run the same Pacman in the web browser. I'm for translation rather than virtualization I guess.

tripzilch5• 15 years ago

> If you run this through closure-compiler it's reduced to 2000 lines > which is nothing next to Underscore, jQuery, Dojo, etc.

jQuery is 9000 lines, uncompressed with all the comments.

I call that about the same order of magnitude as the things you mention, hardly "next to nothing".

Additionally, just about every line in jQuery is actually useful for something, even the optimized code seems to mostly consist of a whole load of getters and setters and definitions of what addition and multiplication does.

> I haven't looked into the language yet and unless you haven't either let's all refrain from judgements based on this silly metric alone.

Lines of code stops being a "silly metric" when the numbers get really big, as they do here.

> Don't get me started on the whining about math performance. Reminds me of dinosaurs whining about how assembly is better than C is better than Java is better than.... There is more to software development than math.

Surely you didn't mean "There is more to software development than performance." :-)

Easy to pick off "math". But is this stuff not supposed to run in a browser? I'll reconsider when I see a simple application running smoothly on a cheap 3 year old desktop PC.

No, a Hello World program that compiles to 170kloc is what is ridiculous. That you can optimize it to 2kloc is nice, but it's still just a Hello World program.

And a more serious program, how big would that be?

alttag• 15 years ago

  > "There is more to software development than performance."

On the other hand, development is all about performance.

It's just a matter of what we mean by "performance". Time to run? Time to develop? Adoption rate? Income generated? Fame?

Software is always about doing something better. The controversy comes when we try to evaluate "better."

tripzilch5• 15 years ago

> Circle jerks and knee-jerk reactions are for Reddit, not HN.

> Don't get me started on the whining

What is it with all the hostility from the people defending Dart? How about you display some of this expected HN behaviour yourself?

carsongross• 15 years ago

Wait, is this an indictment of Dart? Or of Javascript?

awj• 15 years ago

I thought it was an indictment of ridiculous comparisons...

KirinDave3• 15 years ago

As you gaze into this thread, it gazes into you.

jronkone• 15 years ago

It's official now: Dart is meant as a practical joke to show why Javascript needs to be replaced by something sane like a bytecode VM.

Either that, or I don't want to surf this internet anymore.

bjacobso• 15 years ago

"Javascript needs to be replaced by something sane" really? You should read what the goals are for Dart.

perlgeek• 15 years ago

So this includes the full Dart runtime library compiled to JS, and people make a big deal out of it being a long listing.

devin4• 15 years ago

The comments on this thread are a disgrace. Read more.

KirinDave3• 15 years ago

So the joke is that a prototype of a whole separate language has to include its runtime in its cross-compiled output? Did people... think this wouldn't be the case? Do they think that Javascript is not thousands of lines of C/C++ lurking in your browser?

Good joke guys, but I don't think you realize which way the punchline is pointing...

It sort of amazes me that people are being so hard on Dart, given that they should be grasping for any chance to leave the warty and dated pile of compromises that is Javascript behind. Even the javascript community seems to tacitly admit that Javascript is a bit of diamond amongst a whole lot of dross; hence CoffeeScript and books like "Javascript: The Good Parts".

devin4• 15 years ago

Amen. The "me too" culture that's going on w/r/t Dart is really disappointing.

Google: "Hey everyone, let's make the browser better by switching to something that smells less like garbage than javascript."

Community: "You forgot a semi-colon!"

Shameful.

msy2• 15 years ago

Sorry but it's been more like

Google: Hey everyone, we have decided the future, here it is, get used to it.

Community: Maybe you should get behind Harmony instead of secretly building replacements to the building blocks of the web and issuing them by imperial decree.

nailer• 15 years ago

> Community: "You forgot a semi-colon!"

The user is king. If Google doesn't give a shit about dart's users - ie programmers - then why should we care?

cubicle677• 15 years ago

mate, it's not all that bad. people's reactions here will have pretty close to zero impact on the long term success or otherwise of Dart; programming languages are still much of a meritocracy

that said, wading in and telling people the things they like smell like garbage isn't the most effective way of getting them onside. If you're going to do that, then what you're selling better darn well blow their socks off, and Dart isn't doing that.

personally, I really enjoy writing js (and I have a growing love for coffeescript as well) and I don't feel Dart offers anything I need yet. I'll wait and see what happens

cdata3• 15 years ago

"...given that they should be grasping for any chance to leave the warty and dated pile of compromises that is Javascript behind..."

I would not characterize the JavaScript community as desperate graspers, but even so, I don't see the virtue in grasping for the chance to replace a dated pile of compromises with a contemporary pile of compromises. All the hate is totally overblown - this project is young and will likely improve a lot over time - but that doesn't change the fact that what we've seen of this project so far places it squarely in the category of 'novelty.'

devin4• 15 years ago

Not desperate graspers? Try and count the number of libraries and frameworks that have come out in the last 5 years for JavaScript. Think of how many "to JS" solutions there are. Seriously, google that. Like 20? 25? How much "to C" solutions do you see getting on the front page of Hacker News these days?

It's staggering how much 'grasping' has been happening compared to other ecosystems. It's ironic that people would scoff at a well-designed replacement like Dart in its early stages. The only reason it's fashionable to do so is because it's Google. If this was some independent developer everyone would be falling over themselves to dig in.

"Oh, notch of Minecraft fame played a role? Count me in."

The mob mentality of the programming community at-large is worthy of being called despicable if only for creating precisely these sorts of regularly-scheduled circle-jerk bash sessions. The sessions I'm referring to involve "smarter than you" ass hats who walk around dumping on anything that doesn't "feel" right to them. If you want to "feel" good, go elsewhere. This is about moving the web forward.

Dear Internet, kindly get your head out of your ass.

spc476• 15 years ago

Yes, but I don't have to download the umpteenth thousands of C/C++ code that comprise the javascript engine and compile that each time I download jQuery.js.

Now, to be fair, I did a check of Lua, and it's 16,370 lines of C code (version 5.1.4, with all the current patches), so yes, 17,000+ lines of code for a VM doesn't appear quite that bad. I think what most people are complaining about is downloading that each time they hit a dart script.

dbbo• 15 years ago

I can't believe that a gist somehow turned into a 4chan thread. I found that infinitely more horrifying than the fact that a hello-world program nearly crashed my browser through sheer size.

tripzilch5• 15 years ago

This is not going to be your century :-D

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

Oooooooo. So it's Javascript except with a highly constraining layer of blub on top of it. I'll go back to learning coffeescript then...

geon2• 15 years ago

I'd say the gist demonstrates that it's not Javascript. What you see is the entire runtime, compiled to naive js.

If anything, Coffeescript is "just" js with syntactic sugar. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

cubicle677• 15 years ago

that's a really interesting comment. where exactly is the line drawn between "just syntactic sugar" and "a different language"?

Here we have two ways of expressing code, coffeescript and dart. Both are syntactically quite different from js, both offer features not found in js, both encourage you to write code differently to how you would in js and both compile to plain js.

charliesome• 15 years ago

People got just as pissed off as this over the amount of code Fructose (my Ruby-PHP compiler) outputted for Hello World.

Looks like most here don't know how compilers work.

illumen• 15 years ago

ewwwww

thomasfl• 15 years ago

I prefer coffescript https://gist.github.com/1277567

robinduckett• 15 years ago

I'm noticing all those functions being defined with ever increasing argument counts. I'm sure Google will optimise the output one day, as soon as they learn about arguments.length.

pmr_• 15 years ago

This reminds me of the very early days of C++ were people would use the size of a compiled "Hello World" to argue their point. C++ targets a completely different domain from JS where the size of the runtime etc. is somewhat important and it makes sense to think about this.

I always thought that JS had this culture of "it works and is fast enough for most users" attached to it, so I'm curious what is so different here? Every JS application nowadays comes with tons of framework code already. Does it make a big difference if you carry around a (non-minified) 17000 lines runtime?

Of course, if you argue about elegance, none of this matters.

V1• 15 years ago

Google Dart was designed to build large scale web applications, yet all their demos and example code only includes small applications. That still require quite a lot of code to build.

I don't see any profit of building a application in dart, if you have to create more code your self than you would with a regular HTML5 based application.

As this "Hello World" demo shows, the only thing It's good at is creating bloat and this will probably stay this way until native parsers are implemented.

rhizome31• 15 years ago

I haven't seen such a neatly formatted piece of JavaScript code in a long time.

yaakov342• 15 years ago

This is called "a runtime". A bunch of things that have to be loaded on the target machine for use by a compiled program. Just about every compiler works this way, whether the output is machine code or JavaScript. It is possible to not emit or load the parts of the runtime which will not be used by a given program, but that's difficult and in many cases even impossible.

I am not a web programmer, and I don't use JS and don't plan to use Dart, but I am flabbergasted that a bunch of techies are going wild and posting facepalm pictures over a perfectly normal technical situation. Maybe Google will pare down the runtime in the future, maybe they will figure out a way to exclude parts of it which are not needed, but right now they are just making the default technical choice that just about all compilers make. This is a non-story. Compile "Hello world" into an executable, and see how many kilobytes it takes on most architectures, despite the object file being a few bytes. Geez.

ootachi6• 15 years ago

In general it's true that you can't avoid the runtime, but in this case I think people's expectations are colored by CoffeeScript, which offers (for many) a more productive environment than vanilla JavaScript, with no runtime at all. Since Dart is a CoffeeScript competitor in the "languages that compile to JS" space, this is a legitimate disadvantage. Dart may well have so many advantages over CS that this becomes a non-issue in practice, but we shouldn't pretend this isn't a story at all.

yaakov342• 15 years ago

I agree that it's perfectly legitimate to discuss the runtime needed for Dart, and point out that it's a disadvantage that it is needed at all, or to criticize the runtime, or whatever.

What shocks me is that people who are supposed to be techies are pointing their fingers at the runtime and making monkey noises, because they apparently have never seen a language runtime or heard of the concept. Dart did not compile "Hello, world" to 17000 lines of code; most of that code has nothing to do with the specific program. And that's the usual situation for compilers, although some specific compilers can avoid that (e.g. CoffeeScript, which is a close mapping of its target architecture).

DanielRibeiro2• 15 years ago

This thread answers how long a Hellow World executable is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3098672

mike_ivanov• 15 years ago

> This is called "a runtime". > I am not a web programmer

You see, it's not a spherical runtime in vacuum. In practical terms it's more like a whole lot of stuff to download, parse and execute each time your browser hits a new page.

eli• 15 years ago

shrug

I bet most of the people including JQuery on their pages only use a fraction of its functionality even though it all must be parsed. So what?

munificent• 15 years ago

> maybe they will figure out a way to exclude parts of it which are not needed

This is called "tree-shaking", is fairly standard, and is on the to-do list. I believe it does some now, but I think more is coming.

nathanb• 15 years ago

> I am flabbergasted that a bunch of techies are going wild and posting facepalm pictures over a perfectly normal technical situation

Have you actually met any techies lately?

retrofit_brain• 15 years ago

This comparison is asinine at best. The runtime is bound to be bigger. And remember DART eventually will have the runtime included in Chrome and hopefully other browsers. The way things are going in the browser world, all people might actually care about is Chrome and if there is a wonderful IDE support which comes with strongly typed languages, there is a real shot at this becoming a standard.

jroseattle2• 15 years ago

If Microsoft had suggested this, they would be persecuted and beat into submission.

Tloewald2• 15 years ago

Today yes. In 1995 it would get 95% market share.

jroseattle2• 15 years ago

Heh, true that.

eddieplan9• 15 years ago

I think the problem of Dart and Google's many strategies in web application developer tool area is the belief that the current state of web app development is in a very serious terminal illness that requires chemotherapy, with a complete change of how we do things, while many others - notably the CoffeeScript camp - have shown that we are still essentially in good shape and all we need is some herbal tea to help the immune system. I am not discounting the value of the bold move of Google, but I am very disappointed to see a big negligence of the good parts of JavaScript and other dynamic languages and a blind copy of Java (mis)features. I have not seen Google contributing to the common and popular JavaScript frameworks like jQuery (and Microsoft did... what a strange world). Maybe it's NIH syndrome at play.

threedot• 15 years ago

so fuckin what

"Hello World" in Dart, compiled to JavaScript

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