Dart 1.0 Is Out

http://news.dartlang.org/2013/11/dart-10-stable-sdk-for-structured-web.html

by rdtsc • 13 years ago

222 159 13 years ago

news.dartlang.org

rdtsc8• 13 years ago

List of companies using it in production (from the blog post):

* Blossom

* Montage

* Soundtrap

* Mandrill

* Google's internal CRM app

* Google Elections

Companies that started to add support for it: Adobe, drone.io, and JetBrains

mikehotel• 13 years ago

Going forward, the Dart team will focus on improving Dartium, increasing Dart performance, and ensuring the platform remains rock solid. In particular, changes to core technologies will be backward-compatible for the foreseeable future.

Today’s release marks the first time Dart is officially production-ready, and we’re seeing teams like Blossom, Montage, Soundtrap, Mandrill, Google's internal CRM app and Google Elections, already successfully using Dart in production. In addition, companies like Adobe, drone.io, and JetBrains have started to add Dart support to their products.

Congrats to the team on releasing 1. Now to find a project to try it out in...

notok22• 13 years ago

I almost finished the Language Tour when I went to the faq and was dissapointed to see that the dart2js compiler supports only ie9+ (https://www.dartlang.org/support/faq.html#what-browsers-supp...). Too bad, honestly.

efesak• 13 years ago

jQuery 2 is ie9+ too fyi

quarterto2• 13 years ago

And jQuery 1.9+ is API-compatible with 2.0 and works just fine on oldIE.

nilliams3• 13 years ago

Opinion: nobody should be shipping any JS to oldIE, period.

Their JS engines are woeful. Even if you can get something app-like (the kind of thing you would use dart for) to work, your app won't scale w.r.t. perf so you're painting yourself into a corner.

quarterto2• 13 years ago

That's your opinion and you're entitled to it but people do still have to ship things for IE6-8.

amackera• 13 years ago

The reality is that lots of web apps must be capable of running on IE due to external restrictions (think enterprise or government).

kodablah• 13 years ago

I think Dart has the potential to become a target for other languages [1]. The already-high-level code has a performant VM and it takes advantage of optional typing (unlike any other VMs I am aware of). In order to do so though, they should at least make a spawnString (like isolate's spawnUri) or even better, have the ability to JIT dart code by string but not execute it right away.

1 - https://www.dartlang.org/articles/why-not-bytecode/

pacala• 13 years ago

I hope people give Dart a chance before unleashing the fragmentation zoo upon it. It's quite a nice language.

georgemcbay2• 13 years ago

Adobe's AVM2 (ActionScript 3 VM) took advantage of optional typing.

Once upon a time this was going to be the basis of ECMAScript4 via tamarin, but that never panned out for lots of reasons, most of them political.

camus23• 13 years ago

Funny how things would be different today.

ES4 failed mainly because some people thought ES3 was good enough.

Adobe,harshly critized for Flash was the one pushing for a better javascript.

I will never understand why Microsoft basically killed ES4. They had their own implementation on .net ( JScript.net ) so it's not like it was going to be a huge effort. The only reason would be Microsoft pushing Silverlight at that time which was a huge flop. We basically lost a decade because of it, as i predict javascript will eventually look like ES4,that's inevitable.

munificent4• 13 years ago

In order to do so though, they should at least make a spawnString (like isolate's spawnUri) or even better, have the ability to JIT dart code by string but not execute it right away.

Of all of the core libraries in Dart (core, html, io, async, etc.) the isolate library has had the least attention so far. Now that those other libraries are stable, I'm hoping the corelib folks will have the time to give isolates some much needed love.

I definitely want spawnString() too and we've had to do some gross workarounds in pub to deal with its absence (dumping stuff to temp files).

andyl2• 13 years ago

Just waiting for "Works best on Chrome"

Silverlight and ActiveX have already shown the usefulness of proprietary enhancements.

No thanks.

snird• 13 years ago

Dart is as open as possible. this is nothing like silverlight or activex.

limsup• 13 years ago

It compiles to JavaScript. The VM and dart2js are MIT licensed. It's not the same situation.

spankalee3• 13 years ago

And Dart is not a plugin, it gives you the whole DOM (though a _much_ improved API), unlike Silverlight, ActiveX, Flash, Java or any other plugin.

threeseed4• 13 years ago

And who is responsible for keeping the DartVM/Dart2JS behaviour in sync ?

Google being the ONLY committers don't exactly have a motivation to.

gkhnarik• 13 years ago

The code will be compiled to JS, I don't think it is gonna make difference which browser you use.

rdtsc8• 13 years ago

Just waiting for "Works best on Chrome"

Can't wait. I am already using Chrome, if it works best I'll like it even more.

Silverlight and ActiveX have already shown the usefulness of proprietary enhancements.

So how do I compile Silverlight to .js again?

No thanks.

Yes please!

dgregd• 13 years ago

JavaScript was also build as proprietary enhancement :)

pjspycha• 13 years ago

People don't really remember what the Web looked like back in Netscape Navigator days. Back then IE replicated some quirks from Netscape so websites would look similar.

10098• 13 years ago

Dart != ActiveX

Oh, and by the way, ActiveX would be awesome if it didn't have all the security flaws and was more portable. Too bad it didn't work.

melling• 13 years ago

Well, Dart will eventually work best on Chrome because of the Dart VM. There's nothing stopping Mozilla from adding the VM to Firefox, of course. Getting an additional 2x-4x performance boost would be great.

azakai10• 13 years ago

There are at least two problems with adding the Dart VM:

1. Standards. The Dart VM is not part of any web standard, nor part of a spec that has interest from multiple vendors, so it should not be shipped in a standards-compliant browser. This is a matter of principle that most browsers agree on these days, see for example Google's Blink guidelines: http://www.chromium.org/blink#new-features

2. Effort. Adding a new VM into a browser is a huge amount of effort. The VM can't just be added even if it is open source (which it is) - it's very hard to integrate such a thing properly into a browser, technically speaking. Also aside from technical effort, there is also effort to start a new standards process for a new language.

chrismsnz2• 13 years ago

What exactly is proprietary about it?

Browser vendors are free to integrate the VM into their products, and if they don't want to there is dart2js which is acceptable.

This isn't even close to the situation presented by Silverlight, ActiveX and I feel like you're being duplicitous by comparing them.

pcwalton2• 13 years ago

Browser vendors are free to integrate the VM into their products, and if they don't want to there is dart2js which is acceptable.

That's a tremendous amount of effort and it is likely to reduce the performance of JavaScript. Cross-language GC, in particular, is really hard. See Filip Pizlo's message to webkit-dev on this subject (citing two recent papers), which is part of the reason that Dart support was shot down when Google proposed adding it to WebKit: https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/...

epsylon2• 13 years ago

Browser vendors are free to integrate the VM into their products

No they aren't. Integrating a Google-controlled VM into any software project (for example, Firefox) isn't trivial (you need lots of resources for it) nor is desirable (the technology is driven and controlled by Google).

davidedicillo• 13 years ago

Would someone who knows HTML/CSS/RoR better of learning Dart or JS next?

dragonwriter5• 13 years ago

Without any additional special assumptions about the someone and their particular circumstances, learning JS is probably a lower risk investment, learning Dart is probably higher risk and higher potential payoff; thinking only in terms of future income potential.

camus23• 13 years ago

Even if you use language X that compiles to javascript ,you still need to learn javascript, Or it's a bit like learning rails without understanding ruby.

sek• 13 years ago

No, Dart is not CoffeScript.

It really compiles, so you don't have to worry about it. The languages are so similar that stuff that is fast in Dartium will work pretty fine in JS.

RobAtticus• 13 years ago

I don't need to learn assembly to use C. I don't need to learn the JVM bytecode to use Java.

Sure for special cases knowing those things can help get the very best out of your code, but for the other 99% of the time, it is not necessary.

(Edit: Not that I recommend Dart over JS necessarily, but I don't agree with your argument.)

FuzzyDunlop• 13 years ago

You can do Rails to a fair extent without really knowing Ruby, and just fumbling through it with a bunch of gems and messy code. In some ways it can be the gateway to learning Ruby itself, if you were so inclined to do so.

For things like CoffeeScript, which are fairly thin layers over another language, I'd always advise to just learn JS first. Dart and Clojurescript though are so far removed from their compilation target that you don't really need to know the JS, as long as there's good library support for what you want to do. In the case of clojurescript the interop is so seamless that it puts the focus on learning the APIs, which is where the true complexity lies. Of course, and even more so with typing, you also have the compiler to back you up.

libria• 13 years ago

I really like Dart and hope it - or something like it - replaces javascript soon, but I'd heavily recommend learning javascript instead. I'll be quite some time, if ever till Dart is even 1/4 of the client side market.

Even if you did learn Dart, you'd inevitably have to include external javascript libraries, so you'll have to know javascript anyway.

And Google is still actively promoting javascript in things like AppScript and Angular js.

tzury• 13 years ago

So if i get it right, the way "Google" sees the future, there is Go at the server side and Dart at client side (which is in fact JS). Am I wrong?

I would expect Google, or at least, a team at Google, to take over NodeJS which is based on their V8 and expand it to universal server client language and libs. JS can be complied into go binaries after all, so why not letting people write apps using the same language.

Let alone I see no effort on their side bringing any of those language into the native world of Android, instead we got this cluttering Java thing as almost the only options for most projects.

spankalee3• 13 years ago

The point of view within Google that spawned Dart is that JavaScript as a language has major and unfixable flaws that severely raise the cost of developing large apps. It's nice that node.js uses V8, but being based on a Google project does nothing to address the language issues.

Note that that point of view is not universally shared at Google, and many people are fine with JavaScript, and probably would use node.js.

tomp• 13 years ago

I believe Google is using Go for completely different projects (i.e. fast backend services that don't really interact with the browser).

staunch• 13 years ago

Assuming that Google has much of an overall strategy here is probably a mistake.

munificent4• 13 years ago

I see no effort on their side bringing any of those language into the native world of Android

The Dart VM supports ARM, and I've seen prototypes that get it running on Android. The team hasn't had much time to put into it yet, but I wouldn't infer that that says much about what we'll do in the future. (Not that I'm making any promises, either.)

dragonwriter5• 13 years ago

So if i get it right, the way "Google" sees the future, there is Go at the server side and Dart at client side (which is in fact JS). Am I wrong?

Yes, you are, in fact, wrong. Google doesn't have so narrow a vision. Dart is server and client side (the native VM is, aside from a for-testing-only build, server-side only now.) But the client side isn't just Dart (or JS, in which Google has also invested heavily), its also C/C++, and other languages, hence PNaCl, which also just went into general release.

And, sure, Go is a server-side language that Google is putting energy into, but so is Dart. And I doubt their vision ends there, those are just a couple of the more visible active fronts.

I would expect Google, or at least, a team at Google, to take over NodeJS which is based on their V8 and expand it to universal server client language and libs.

The existing NodeJS team is doing enough for server-side JS-on-V8, and its open source -- Google could throw more resources, but its probably not the best bang-for-their buck in terms of developing new technologies that might improve the options for the things Google is concerned about. Doing what other people aren't doing is a bigger win.

Let alone I see no effort on their side bringing any of those language into the native world of Android

I've seen quite a bit about Dart on Android (though I think there are issues with building the current distribution.) Less on Go.

RivieraKid• 13 years ago

Dart is a better Java (that can run in a browser if you want).

Go is a better C++.

pwnna• 13 years ago

Actually I wouldn't say Go is a better C++.

Rust is a better C++. Go is.. weird. I would even say it is a better Java.

pjmlp3• 13 years ago

Go is a better C++.

Only when it gets generics, real enumerations, dynamic loading support, proper dependency management for large scale projects.

epsylon2• 13 years ago

For a few cherry-picked definitions of better and C++.

turbo_pax• 13 years ago

And don't forget AngularDart or whatever for the front-end framework. I wish the name "Google" wasn't attached to any of these projects as I'm a huge fan of them but not the company they're born out of.

afsina4• 13 years ago

They avoid attaching Google name to those projects and their licenses are proper. There is no "Google" word in the dart front page except "Dart is an open-source project with contributors from Google and elsewhere.".

tzaman• 13 years ago

Why doesn't Google include the native Dart VM in Chrome? I think it would boost it's usage significantly. Maybe I'm missing a bigger picture.

dragonwriter5• 13 years ago

Why doesn't Google include the native Dart VM in Chrome?

Probably because Dartium (Chome w/Dart) doesn't yet have the kind of performance advantage that makes it compelling enough to split the web that way -- making developers use dart2js for client code means that you don't need separate client code for Chrome (Dart) and everyone else (JS) -- and needing to commit to extended support of two different scripting runtimes in Chrome for the future.

afsina4• 13 years ago

They need make some changes in Chrome for doing this right. They aim to make DOM nodes garbage collectible with project oilpan [1] AFAIK. Both Dart and V8 VM will benefit from this. So this will take some time. But Dart is already very useful with Dartium for development and Dart2Js for deployment.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...

kyrra• 13 years ago

This is exactly the issue.

They are working on an experimental solution to let garbage collection happen for DOM nodes that are created from Dart or V8. This basically requires a rewrite of the memory management of DOM nodes. This is still very much a work in progress and not ready for prime time.

The solution the team uses for Dartium is not the same as what they want to do for the shipping version of Chrome, so it'll be a bit before that's ready.

amix• 13 years ago

This is really awesome! Congrats to the team!

We have a ton of JavaScript/CoffeeScript code and I really wish we could use something like Dart. JavaScript is great for smaller projects, but once you get a ton of code it really becomes a unmanageable mess.

I think tho' it would be amazing if Dart could run on the server side as well. This way you could just have one language on both the client and the server.

spankalee3• 13 years ago

Dart does run on the server. The VM runs standalone for scripts and long-running apps, and the dart:io library provides very node.js like file, network and HTTP APIs, with the addition of Isolates for actor-like concurrency.

camus23• 13 years ago

If you are looking for a structured language (for front end dev), Typescript is a better alternative imho. Javascript devs can still read it and it's compatible with any JS library out there.

Dart not so much since the semantics are different.You can still interact with JS libs but it's not as straight foward as TS.

I tested a number of options (GWT,Haxe,CS,Dart,Opal,Jsx,...),while i'm not a Microsoft fan(by a long shot),Typescript is the solution that allows the best integration with legacy code and pure JS libraries,while making easy to port old java/C#/as3 code to JS.

Flow• 13 years ago

That the semantics are different from Javascript is one of the big selling points of Dart. :)

michaelwww• 13 years ago

I've done a project in Dart and another in TypeScript and like them both a lot more than doing straight JavaScript. I appreciate the optional type checking in both and the IDE support that each enables. TypeScript is appropriate if your project is more quickly completed with existing libraries like jQuery UI and needs to run on older browsers. Dart is appropriate if you don't need to use older established JS libs and IE9 and above are your target requirements. I like having them both in the toolbox, but I prefer Dart slightly more than TypeScript for various reasons.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 13 years ago

I agree with this very much. Dart is a new language; JS is an existing language, improved.

Dart actually has horrible semantics in places. Only if x === true will if(x) run.

niutech• 13 years ago

Why don't you choose JSX or TypeScript? The latter is a superset of JavaScript, so migration should be a breeze.

If you'd like the same language for client and server side, try Kotlin or HaXe.

For now, Dart doesn't have a crossbrowser VM yet (except for Dartium), so it doesn't give you any performance boost over JavaScript. Maybe one day there will be a cross-browser Dart VM as a PNaCl or asm.js module?

eliben• 13 years ago

I'm curious - what stops you from using dart2js today? Isn't it kinda like CoffeeScript? If you already have the latter, you already have workflow for "something that compiles to JS" as part of your app.

lowboy• 13 years ago

People have found success in managing large Javascript codebases through good design choices like module systems (AMD/CommonJS), using the SRP to keep modules tight, and testing. It's tough (nigh impossible?) to retrofit those design choices onto an existing codebase.

Dart and TypeScript seem to offer a more familiar path to people who are used to Java/.NET/etc and who have been burned by messy JS codebases.

kevincennis• 13 years ago

In fairness to JavaScript, it is absolutely possible to write very large apps and keep them organized and maintainable.

I think the issue is that JS doesn't have strong conventions for how to do that, so you actually need to make good choices that work well with your app.

I have no doubt that Dart makes that stuff easier, but there's nothing inherent to JavaScript that makes it unsuitable for larger applications. It just forces you to make decisions.

rdtsc8• 13 years ago

In fairness to JavaScript, it is absolutely possible to write very large apps and keep them organized and maintainable.

I see it a bit like when Dijkstra wrote "Go To Statement Considered Harmful". I have no doubt a lot of developers at the time objected to it and said "that is wrong, it is possible to write good code using GOTO". Because they probably wrote code using GOTOs and some of that code was probably decent quality.

marrs• 13 years ago

Javascript comes from a school that most people simply didn't attend. But it's actually ahead of the curve by about 10 years, as evidenced by the emergence of Scala and co.

ancarda• 13 years ago

I think tho' it would be amazing if Dart could run on the server side as well.

It does but I think Go might be more fitting for that purpose.

bhauer• 13 years ago

Dart definitely runs on the server side. We had plain Dart and two of its initial web frameworks, Start and Stream, in Round 7 of our benchmarks project [1]. It performs modestly well, and I suspect there room to optimize further.

[1] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r7&hw=i7...

rayiner2• 13 years ago

How's the Emacs mode?

rdtsc8• 13 years ago

The one I am using (and I don't even remember which one it is or if there are multiple ones) does basic highlighting. There is no re-factoring support that I could find yet.

ntkachov• 13 years ago

This is speculation: but JetBrains work on dart IDE, android releasing ART, I'm tempted to say we're 2 years out from seeing DART running on android. It makes sense from a business sense, have the option of running dart apps on android would free the platform from its java dependance.

mark_l_watson2• 13 years ago

I hope that you are correct! That would be great. I have experimented with Dart on both client and server and it is a nice language. Fun to develop with.

ahoge5• 13 years ago

The VM already works on Android (x86 and ARM - not sure about MIPS).

floitsch2• 13 years ago

The VM works on MIPS too.

clhodapp• 13 years ago

What does ART have to do with Dart?

Twirrim2• 13 years ago

3 letters

jalan2• 13 years ago

I am a newbie in field of Web Development, and recently I felt in love with JavaScript, especially because of the sheer capability to write Client side and Server side code in same language. Thanks to Meteor.js, it made my bond with JavaScript even more stronger.

But now with the buzz of Google Dart going around, I am afraid that, am I betting on the wrong horse? Is it the right to jump on Google Dart bandwagon? To be honest, it do looks promising.

Please guide me, what should I do, since I am a newbie, I want to take advantage of the fact that, since I don't know anything, I better learn something that have much promising future, and have an edge over technology.

dangoor• 13 years ago

Honestly, JavaScript has orders of magnitude more usage and a lot more momentum than Dart does. I don't think you'll be harming your career prospects in becoming proficient in JS.

I also think there are better choices than Dart if you want to learn something that will expand your mind. Dart strikes me as a very practical language.

mark_l_watson2• 13 years ago

I have spent time with both Dart and with JavaScript + Meteor. Both are good stacks. If you are already up to speed on Meteor, why not just use that for a year, build applications, and maybe look at alternatives later.

It is probably best to start writing web apps, and not on learning many tools.

jalan2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the advise, I am thinking of concentrating on JavaScript + Meteor for now.

threeseed4• 13 years ago

Learn Javascript. Dart is a dead end technology.

ALL the committers are from Google and it is not an open standard which basically eliminates any chance that Mozilla/Apple will ever consider adopting it. And frankly with Apple dominating the mobile web without them any solution will never eventuate to anything.

ahoge5• 13 years ago

[Dart] is not an open standard

It will get standardized in the not too distant future. [1]

Apple dominating the mobile web

Huh? Android's market share is over 80%. iOS got about 13%. [2]

[1] http://www.ecma-international.org/news/Dart%20workshop.htm

[2] http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/11/12/idc-android-hit-81-...

woven3• 13 years ago

Psyched! See our HN post about our Dart app (Dart rocks) and our team's disappointment with not being included in the 1.0 announcement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6735044

munificent4• 13 years ago

I don't know anything about what went into deciding which companies were mentioned in the announcement, but I know for certain I and others on the team have a ton of respect and gratitude for all of the help you and Kai have given us. Thanks!

woven3• 13 years ago

Thank you! And congrats!

vfclists• 13 years ago

Shameless plug!!

Twirrim2• 13 years ago

Welcome to HN, home of the shameless plug and the nearly mindless rants.

protomyth• 13 years ago

Is there a downloadable reference manual for the language? I see book excerpts, but not a complete language reference.

floitsch2• 13 years ago

https://www.dartlang.org/docs/spec/

afsina4• 13 years ago

This is Language spec. not useful for developers. I would suggest downloading 5 links as HTML from here:

https://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and-running/

nfoz• 13 years ago

Sad to throw away the brilliance of prototypes to go back to single-inheritance classes. uck

taylodl• 13 years ago

My thoughts exactly. Dart is representative of 90's language design and as such is a step backward. That's not to say JS doesn't have its issues, but Dart isn't the solution.

mraleph• 13 years ago

JS prototypes provide a single parent lookup delegation, which is not that different from single inheritance and is mostly used to emulate single inheritance class systems in the wild.

Furthermore Dart supports mixins, so it's not exactly single inheritance classes.

voyou• 13 years ago

Could you explain the brilliance of prototypes? Prototypes in JavaScript are pretty awful, but I've never been sure if that's just the JavaScript implementation (for instance, the lack of a good way to clone an object makes using prototypes in JS more painful than it needs to be), or the concept of prototypes more generally.

ionforce• 13 years ago

How are prototypes brilliant? I'm not familiar with them outside of JavaScript. Maybe you could provide some examples?

Bahamut3• 13 years ago

Dart seems interesting, but its sponsorship by Google creates a major problem - what incentive does Microsoft, Mozilla, or Apple have to implement Dart support in their browsers? What about JavaScript devs who choose not to support Dart (especially since many still have to support even as far back as IE8 due to enterprise/companies/organizations/schools that opt for long-term support solutions for software)? I don't think good answers are available to these questions, which makes me hesitant to jump in as quickly.

klodolph• 13 years ago

Dart also compiles to JavaScript, and was designed to do so from the very beginning.

Bahamut3• 13 years ago

It adds complexity to the dev process, and I'm not sure of the benefits of said complexity. The devs still at the core need to understand JavaScript it seems like.

sigzero3• 13 years ago

Maybe a first step into getting some type of vm into the browser that is performant and allows multiple languages to run against it like the JVM?

moca• 13 years ago

Some people wanted to build optional-typing language for real world for decades, and finally made it. That is a great achievement.

From product point of view, Google would be much better to port Android Dalvik to Chrome. You can run GWT Java code in browser years ago. Running the same code using JVM would be much faster with much less code change. 5-10 man-year would be enough to do the porting, and it will share work between Android and Chrome for years to come. Of course, it would be much boring research work though.

From performance point of view, asm.js gets much better performance with way less work. No matter how good Dart performs, it would never make sense to port high performance C/C++ game code to Dart, so you end up having to use both Dart + pNaCl, which is an awful solution. Technically, TypeScript is more interesting if Microsoft can keep it simple and fast, but I doubt Microsoft would make anything simple.

Dart 1.0 Is Out

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