Dart Website Relaunch with 1.0 Release

https://www.dartlang.org/

by allanberger • 13 years ago

84 120 13 years ago

nailer19• 13 years ago

Dart is new, yet familiar

Yes, but most people who write web apps don't like Java syntax. Publicising Dart without changing that won't stop the low adoption Dart's had for the last two years.

Edit: a reminder that that was the biggest piece of feedback from Dart announcement 776 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=oEG20axbbQ4CeS0NXvabbv

WoodenChair8• 13 years ago

I can't think of any language other than Go that had relatively high adoption pre-1.0 . Of course I'm sure someone will point out a few examples... but I digress: Last I checked Java was the #1 or #2 top programming language in the world. Perhaps Dart makes it easier for a Java developer to do front-end web development while using a familiar paradigm.

cromwellian3• 13 years ago

Reports of Java's death has been greatly exaggerated ;-)My guess is, Java8 will solve a lot of the whining about boilerplate types. The closure syntax, is in someways, more economical than JS.

nailer19• 13 years ago

Version numbers are arbitrary, and most of the JS community were quite ready to check out dart as soon as it was released.

Agreed re existing java developers though. But even in the java community, scala syntax is popular for the same radios dart is unpopular for web devs. I've seen more typescript interest than I have dart interest, again because type safety has nothing to do with unnecessary verbosity.

Languages have users just like programs do. We know, as developers, that making users do extra work is poor. Java is renowned as the 'I studied computer science at university but...' language. Why is Google unnecessarily repeating the mistakes?

Google: make dart 2 cleaner and you'll immediately engage not just java users, but existing web developers and people new to software as well.

threeseed6• 13 years ago

Please. Every professional developer (including Java focused one) knows enough Javascript to do what they need. Especially with frameworks like JQuery, AngularJS, KnockoutJS etc it all really isn't that hard.

And on large projects which are the domain of Java/.Net developers you often have dedicated Front End developers anyway.

robmcm18• 13 years ago

People that write Java don't like JavaScipt, would be another way to look at it.

Working on large scale (tens of developers) web apps has serious issues with JS, and Dart can address some of that.

I don't expect to see AirB&B running via Dart, but Gmail, Google Docs etc will really benefit, and hopefully pave the way for some serious desktop caliber applications.

moondowner• 13 years ago

People that write Java don't like JavaScipt, would be another way to look at it.

Not true, at least not in my case :)

There are webapps that use Java (or any JVM language) on the back-end and JavaScript on the front-end.

Check out Addy Osmani's "Making Maven Grunt": http://addyosmani.com/blog/making-maven-grunt/

nailer19• 13 years ago

People that write Java don't like JavaScipt, would be another way to look at it.

Sure, but for different reasons: principally, lack of type safety. That's completely orthogonal to syntax.

adamors2• 13 years ago

I really fail to see the point of Dart, especially since awesome client side frameworks like Angular already exist.

Why doesn't Google throw more resources at them instead of creating something from scratch that has a very high possibility of being abandoned in the next 2-3 years.

WoodenChair8• 13 years ago

Because writing/improving yet another JavaScript client side library fails to address the fundamental flaws with JavaScript which are well laid out. ECMAScript 6 will likely correct some of these flaws, but the necessity for backward compatibility continues to be a stumbling block. Dart is a clean break and fresh slate while retaining a familiar syntax and interoperability/compatibility.

Is it a long shot that it will unseat Javascript? Sure. But, competition is good for JavaScript. Google's number one interest is in improvement across the entire client side web app infrastructure since its business is built upon it. It can push Dart while improving JavaScript in parallel.

nailer19• 13 years ago

I definitely agree that JS itself could be improved, but while Dart improves some things, it makes others a lot worse. Look at the Fibonacci program on dartlang.org, and compare it to any language that's popular with web developers: Python, ruby, Coffeescript or even scala. Multiply that unnecessary overhead for every function in your app.

adamors2• 13 years ago

Still seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to me. Especially since its from Google; as it is, it looks like the second coming of ActiveX to me.

richbradshaw• 13 years ago

AngularDart does now exist – http://news.dartlang.org/2013/11/angular-announces-angularda..., I wonder if that is going to be the direction that Angular is taken?

lennel• 13 years ago

The problem with angular here is that it eliminates tree shaking in the dart compiler. Angular has the same problem with closure as well. tis a big problem imo which the framework creators best fix.

pygy_• 13 years ago

So far it's not clear cut.

When Angular.dart was announced, some people claimed that it would become the default version, and that features would be backported to the JS version. There were strong rebuttals from googlers, but IIRC none of which from the Angular team itself.

For v1.2, the Angular.js team has rushed the backport a controversial feature[1] from its .dart counterpart three weeks before release, months after the first RC was released, breaking the meaning of a release candidate.

:-/

1. the underscore prefix to make $scope fields private.

robmcm18• 13 years ago

Dart is a language and VM, not a framework.

A framework aids your development and provides tools, it doesn't fix shortcomings in language and runtime.

levosmetalo• 13 years ago

I totally agree on that. What makes Dart better than, for example, GWT or Coffeescript? In the end of the day, it's just a new language targeting JS. And that new language is doesn't have any advanced or interesting features except for the name of the company that created it.

jhawk28• 13 years ago

JS is one aspect of Dart. Using the same language server side is the other. It really seems like a competitor of JS/NodeJS. They do have the challenge of convincing the JS world that the new system is better enough to warrant learning a new language. If it succeeds, it will be interesting to see if it is the Web side or the server side that drives adoption.

spankalee5• 13 years ago

Dart's better than GWT because it's a modern language that is actually designed the be compilable to JavaScript. Not all of Java is compilable to JS, so GWT is really a subset of Java, but it's still verbose. Dart's much more concise and easier to translate to JS, so it's compiler is much faster too, but also adds getters and setters, mixins, operator overloading, implicit interfaces (every class defines an interface), top-level functions, optional typing, (and things Java's just gettgin:closures, collection literals). Dart and it's core libraries being designed for a single-threaded, asynchronous world is a big deal and makes it much more at home in a browser than Java. Where they're similar is in the ability to have tools and libraries that work well together, and mostly sane semantics.

Dart's better than CoffeeScript because it dramatically improves on the semantics of JavaScript. Libraries, classes, interfaces, mixins, only explicit type conversions, lock scope, privacy, no monkey-patching, fixed this binding, final, constructor initializers, optional typing... these are all things that make large programs easier to manage, and tools easier to write. CoffeeScript offers a couple of minor fixes like this binding, but basically is just a different syntax for JS. If Dart were just a different syntax, it wouldn't be worth it, but spend some time with the Editor (or WebStorm) and see the static warnings and errors, refactoring, code-completion, code navigtion, etc. and you'll see how it's miles better for teams.

xxgreg3• 13 years ago

FYI - the Angular team have ported Angular to Dart.

polskibus• 13 years ago

Does dart vm use type information to optimize? I can't find a good explanation. I'd really like to use static typing to gain both speed and early error checking.

mraleph3• 13 years ago

If you mean type annotations then no, right now Dart VM does not use type annotations to optimize things.

Dart VM features an classical adaptive optimizations pipeline that first gathers type information from the run and then optimizes hot methods using collected type feedback to specialize the code.

For more implementation details about Dart VM optimizing compiler you can check out my talk from Strange Loop 2013 http://s3.mrale.ph/StrangeLoop2013.pdf

k__• 13 years ago

When will it switch from JIT to AOT? (SCNR)

tbassetto• 13 years ago

The biggest announcement for me is that the Dart VM will be embedded inside Chrome: https://twitter.com/dart_lang/status/400915745413939200

robmcm18• 13 years ago

I thought this was always the plan, which would make Chrome a must of people using Dart apps. Question is if other browsers would include the DartVM (I guess Opera will) or if they will rely on the JS version.

pjmlp10• 13 years ago

Yes, this was spoken at Google IO, in a talk where it was mentioned plans about merging v8 and dartvm.

Sometimes it pays off to watch the sessions. :)

threeseed6• 13 years ago

I can't imagine Mozilla or Apple adopting Dart unless it is ratified as some standard where they have the ability to contribute to its future roadmap. Apple in particular was burned by Flash and I can't imagine being willing to go down that path again.

DoubleMalt2• 13 years ago

This has sadly the potential of making Chrome second coming of IE6, with enterprises locked in a system that is too successful to have the incentive to evolve.

As long as the Dart specification is not governed gy a body encompassing all major browser vendors, this is a very dangerous development (And yes, I know that being governed by a standards body seriously hampers the evolution of a standard, but everything is a tradeoff...)

mythz7• 13 years ago

Such uninformed comparisons are getting extremely tiresome and I consider to be the enemy of progress. There is nothing more that the Dart Team can do to make it anymore open - they're doing as much as is possible.

This is nothing like IE, which is actually proprietary and closed-source. In contrast, there is absolutely nothing about Dart that's proprietary. Dart is 100% open source, including patents grants, it's completely developed in the open and for the last 2 years has seen steadily progress with feedback from the public mailing list. It's actually a goal for the project that everyone is able to freely use Dart in any capacity. Lars Bak already said that after 1.0 is shipped they're going to work on getting the language standardized. There is nothing legal or technical stopping other browser vendors using Dart, any hesitations are 100% political.

Dart is finally the first real alternative where we may be able to progress beyond JavaScript, that as a core objective also compiles to first-class JavaScript, i.e. many features dismissed because it couldn't be efficiently transpiled to JS. I care about progress, the current state of web development is fragmented and broken, we need to be encouraging more initiatives like Dart that challenges the status-quo and is able to progress past the fragmented inconsistent mess we have to deal with now in trying to develop complex, rich, high-performance web apps.

ahoge3• 13 years ago

enterprises locked in a system

Why would anyone do that? We have a super nice solution for that. It's called "site-specific browser" or SSB.

It's like a browser without address bar, which automatically opens a specific URL on start up.

You can have one per intra-/extranet application and you can update them individually on a as-needed basis.

You get all of the benefits of a fixed platform without any of the downsides. Well, you'll need a little bit more RAM and and a little bit more HDD space, but that really shouldn't be an issue.

Xelom• 13 years ago

It is not the same I guess. Since there is dart2js, I think we can force a Dart application to run on DartVM when the browser is Chrome and run as js when it is not Chrome. I might be mistaken. You'll just see performance gain, the application is the same.

RossM• 13 years ago

I wonder if this means Dart will be available in Opera, since it's based on Chromium now.

Yuioup• 13 years ago

Cool. Does this integrate with Visual Studio / ASP.NET MVC ? Otherwise this is a non-starter for me.

gte525u• 13 years ago

Typically, you would integrate it with ASP.NET the same way you do any other Single-Page App not written in JS or Typescript.

It ships with a dart2js compiler that you can use in VS. However, to really get the ease of development you're looking for you'd probably use VS to build/debug the backend, and additionally, the dart editor (special eclipse version) to debug the front-end. You'd have to enable your backend to support CORS calls for this type of setup. However, Once you are ready to deploy, the app builds to HTML/JS/CSS files that you can just embed normally in your solution.

I think what you're getting at is - is it better than JS or typescript + angular or backbone? It'd probably a matter of taste. The language is different from the "syntactic sugar" on top of JS that typescript is. Dart lets your bridge to standard JS libraries (i.e., Jquery etc), but, it also provides most of the functionality in the standard library. It provide a built-in unit test and logging framework and a nuget style repository of other libraries. Additionally, Dart's Polymer library provides an MVVM framework. You can define controls and combine into single-page webapps.

robmcm18• 13 years ago

I can see Dart being big in enterprise, although with no support for IE7 and IE8 this could be an issue...

pjmlp10• 13 years ago

Not until there is a support across browsers and a must have framework that can only be used from Dart.

I still don't see any enterprise requests for CoffeScript, TypeScript or any other language that targets JavaScript.

When you work in teams, everyone across the company that needs to touch the source code needs to know the respective technologies.

robmcm18• 13 years ago

There is cross support in the form of Dart2JS although that's IE9+

That is true, but then I'm not sure they offer as much as Dart does. (Plus I bet some MS shops use TypeScript).

You would think, but how many people developing Objective C know C well, it's more true in the beginning but as you go on the need to know about the target runtime diminishes. Do you know much about the JavaScript VM in the browser and how that compiles to C?

asb2• 13 years ago

I still don't see any enterprise requests for CoffeScript, TypeScript or any other language that targets JavaScript.

GWT seems to have been widely used.

threeseed6• 13 years ago

Have you even worked in the enterprise ?

Because I have and continue to for the last 20 years and NOBODY is interested in a repeat of the IE6 fiasco.

taude3• 13 years ago

Ha, I know a lot of big enterprise with Adobe Flash/Flex lockin, though that's slowly going away...

taude3• 13 years ago

I don't know...I work a lot in big enterprise stuff, and they've come around. One product we have that most banks use only runs in IE9+. That's really the min level now (or in the near future since our new version of the app isn't due until Feb)

robmcm18• 13 years ago

I work on an FX trading application which has IE7 in the compatibility list :(

All other banks with similar apps have the same targets as far as I know. (HSBC, JPM, MS, RBS, Barclays etc)

josteink• 13 years ago

I can see Dart being big in enterprise, although with no support for IE7 and IE8 this could be an issue...

Actually it's not supported in any standards-compliant browser and only available in Google Chrome.

That makes it a bit of a no-no.

spankalee5• 13 years ago

Dart runs in IE9 and up, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chome.

mythz7• 13 years ago

Awesome congratz to the Dart Team on shipping a quality product to the world!

Really hope they're able to keep investing in Dart, they've got an amazingly talented team and IMO Dart's one of the few languages in recent times with the engineering prowess and right focus on fast iterative development, speed, simplicity, flexibility and consistency that's pushing comp-sci forward.

xxgreg3• 13 years ago

"pushing comp-sci forward"

nit - The Dart team have explicitly said that they are not doing any features based on new computer science research. The Dart project is built on pragmatic engineering decisions, rather than "pushing comp-sci forward".

This is a good thing in my opinion.

Dart Website Relaunch with 1.0 Release

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