Dart Lang 1.2 Released

https://www.dartlang.org/

by WoodenChair • 12 years ago

85 67 12 years ago

themckman• 12 years ago

Working on a project that I kind of want to use the same language for the frontend and the backend. There's, obviously, vanilla JS, maybe clojure and clojurescript, but Dart...

For some reason I never realized it could be used server side. Anyone have any practical experience with an app built entirely in Dart?

xxgreg3• 12 years ago

It works. There are a few people using it server side. There is a Heroku build pack. The HTTP server is a bit slow, sounds like this is being addressed, and shouldn't be a limiting factor. I wrote a postgresql driver, which works ok. More users, issues filed and patches are always welcome ;)

xster2• 12 years ago

Now if meteorjs does Dart too... one language to rule them all

andyl• 12 years ago

Dart: Google's ActiveX

Symmetry• 12 years ago

Would ActiveX have been so bad if it was open source and not tied into the operating system?

corysama• 12 years ago

...and sandboxed?

Dart is a fine language. The main thing is has going against it is the feature widely referred to as "Is Not JavaScript". Thus, the Dart-to-JavaScript compiler.

nivla• 12 years ago

Would ActiveX have been so bad if it was open source and not tied into the operating system?

This is my personal view and it may not be accurate: I don't think being open source or cross platform would have mattered to an average PC user back then. Windows held the dominance among PC users (>95%). It wasn't until the rise of firefox that people started noticing the benefits of open source and standards. ActiveX failed because it was way ahead of its time and that it wasn't sandboxed/virtualized making it a security blunder. The one click front door to your OS resulted in a flurry of exploits and viruses giving its bad rep as we know.

Dart is leading the same path but in a secure way. I think eventually we will end up there with Web Apps and its only a matter of who gets there first.

egeozcan• 12 years ago

I'm not a big fan of Dart but IMHO a "leaked" internal memo on replacing JavaScript and an implementation as a browser embeddable VM which isn't used even in Chrome don't make it as evil as ActiveX.

pix64• 12 years ago

Isn't that NaCl?

haberman8• 12 years ago

Dart is nothing like ActiveX. But apparently it is "cool" to invoke ActiveX for any browser technology you don't like.

ActiveX was a way of loading untrusted binaries in-process with the browser and running them unsandboxed.

Does Dart run untrusted machine code unsandboxed? No.

If Dart is Google's ActiveX, then JavaScript is Netscape's ActiveX, Java is Sun's ActiveX and Emscripten is Mozilla's ActiveX. (Note: none of these is actually true)

Comparisons to Silverlight or Flash would also be inaccurate, since neither can compile to JavaScript and both are closed-source technologies that are not on any path to being standardized.

stusmall2• 12 years ago

Honestly, ActiveX/JApplet comparison seems pretty fair to me. I know you said Java, but still.

msoad• 12 years ago

It's safe to defend Dart to the point that your Gmail will run faster in Chrome that has Dart VM. Then Firefox and IE might fall behind in performing for Google web apps and then you will see how Dart will hurt web ecosystem.

I'm just guessing. So far Dart2JS is pretty close to native Dart.

Touche4• 12 years ago

Dart is Google's JavaScript. JavaScript was developed exclusively by Netscape and forced upon the web because of their dominance. Everyone agrees in hindsight that it was bad to do it that way. And now today Google is attempting the same thing.

jamra• 12 years ago

Dart can compile into javascript. It is nothing like ActiveX. ActiveX is basically running native code from the browser. How are you making this link?

Mikeb852• 12 years ago

Dart's original purpose was having its own VM run in the browser - search 'Dartium'.

Only when that idea failed to gain traction did they turn it into a compile-to-js language...

lukasm2• 12 years ago

I'd love to see dart going mainstream, but nobody would integrate VM, except google.

melling• 12 years ago

It doesn't matter. It compiles to JS and you still get a better language in which to develop large apps. The generated JS is probably faster because of the static analysis.

lukasm2• 12 years ago

Of course it does. Extra abstraction that may cause pain in fixing nasty production bugs, can't use goodies from Dart jak SIMP etc. Logically it doesn't matter, but empirically that doesn't happen.

xster2• 12 years ago

Integrating to client side is also just half of the story. It can also be the new node.js which didn't have to integrate with anyone.

stefantalpalaru2• 12 years ago

It's "Dart" not "Dart lang" just like it's "Go" not "Golang". Let's keep SEO out of common language.

Lambdanaut• 12 years ago

sudo apt-get install golang

stefantalpalaru2• 12 years ago

emerge go

afsina• 12 years ago

Here is the announcement page: http://news.dartlang.org/2014/02/dart-v1-2.html

And release notes: https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!msg/announc...

puppetmaster32• 12 years ago

Comparing TypeScript to Dart, one is clearly much better.

discreteevent• 12 years ago

Would you like to share the answer with the rest of the class?

puppetmaster32• 12 years ago

My comment was for the people that tried both, not bait for the people that know one and not the other.

gtaylor4• 12 years ago

I've been working on a Dart project (http://frontiermap.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/) with StageXL, a Dart transcription of ActionScript's library: http://www.stagexl.org/

I've been meaning to write a blog post on my experience with Dart and StageXL, but as far as the Dart part of things, a few misc. observations:

* Dart shows a lot of influence from Java, and obviously some tinges of JS. I don't really care, I wanted a productive web language with optional static types.

* It is a "boring" language in that it's not doing anything new or earth-shattering syntactically or conceptually. This ended up being a positive to me, in that I was able to ramp up extremely quickly. I'm a Pythonista by trade, I know enough JS/CoffeeScript to get by, and I've got a little bit of Java experience.

* Dart comes with so many tools, to the point where I'm not constantly trying to find and piece together core components like "module" imports, package managers, unit test frameworks, documentation generators, IDE. Not all of the tools are extremely polished at this point (their package browsing/searching site is incredibly basic), but there is a clear "way" to do most things. There's nothing stopping anyone from writing alternatives to the official stuff, either.

* The Dart->JS interop is OK for simple usage cases, but can get a bit complex for others. This is my only big hangup for non-hobby projects. This will improve with time, but it's very clunky for now.

* Types don't have to be specified, but I have tended to provide them for everything. I really like being able to do this, even coming from a Python background.

* The Dart IDE is surprisingly helpful. Debugging is decent, and they've stripped a ton of the bloat out from its Eclipse underpinnings. It does crash a bit on Arch Linux with the latest Oracle Java, though. That said, I hope they get in with the IDEA guys like they did for Android.

* My particular project uses WebGL, and I'm compiling to JS. I have yet to run into any complications with the conversion, and the generated JS has worked well on my two mid-range dev machines (Linux and Mac OS 10.9 on Chrome and Firefox).

* The error messages shown during interpretation/compiling are helpful most of the time, but can get a little more cryptic in certain cases (I've yet to find a pattern, but there probably is). I expect this to improve with time.

Overall, I have been very pleased with Dart, and like it (as a langauge) a lot better than CoffeeScript. Optional types has been my favorite feature, and I really like how "batteries included" Dart is. I'm a backend guy, so I don't have the drive or mental bandwidth to go looking at the various packaging/importing/testing/doc utils in JS land (although that is a perfectly viable approach if you have the time and experience).

The ecosystem obviously can't be compared to JS, since Dart is in its infancy. It'll be good enough for some usage cases, but you may find yourself re-inventing things for others (or shoe-horning things in via the JS interop). For hobby projects, Dart is going to get the nod over the alternatives (Typescript, CoffeeScript, pure JS) until it burns me.

greggman• 12 years ago

What if anything makes Dart better than say ES6 or ES7 or whatever version of JavaScript that adds optional types, generators, etc...

WoodenChair2• 12 years ago

The designers got to mostly start from scratch (some things are there for JS compatibility) not only at the language level, but importantly also at the VM level. It's already ~ 2X faster than V8 and they believe there is room for more performance gains. Then add in all of the nice language features beyond classes and types and you have something worthwhile.

kyrra2• 12 years ago

Dart is usable now. ES6 has long been delayed, and who knows when ES7 will be available for mass usage.

There are lots of intro pages out there to get you a little more familiar with it [0][1][2]. Dart as a language spec isn't all that deep, and it tries to keep things simple and easy to use. A lot of the power I feel like comes from the library and tools that come with the language.

[0] http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/05/dart-is-not-the-langu...

[1] https://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and-running/contents/c...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dart_(programming_language)

xxgreg3• 12 years ago

The best bit about Dart is not new features, but many of the footguns that have been removed compared to JS.

Note: Dart doesn't have generators, and Ecmascript is not planning on adding optional types.

gtaylor4• 12 years ago

I don't really care about ES6 or ES7. The point of my comment wasn't to compare anything. I (subjectively) liked working with Dart. I did like the "batteries included" approach of Dart vs JS, but that's not really a language think so much as it is an ecosystem/leadership difference.

nailer• 12 years ago

Have you used typescript to compare? It adds optional types and class based OO and that's it. It's used for large chunks of Windows 8, eg, xbox music is 100Kloc of typescript.

I do like dart's clean DOM API though.

fidotron4• 12 years ago

To be honest, if XBox Music needs to be implemented in 100k lines of a very high level language there's something very wrong going on.

gtaylor4• 12 years ago

I haven't, but if it has most of the things I mentioned as things I liked, it'd likely be a capable substitution (for me). Dart is good enough for me, though. I really like their approach as a whole.

particlewave• 12 years ago

Using it successfully on large team. Works great and plays well with all the existing JS libraries.

sfjailbird• 12 years ago

GWT is still a very good alternative if you are a Java shop.

Mikeb852• 12 years ago

Haxe has all your pros and more... Static typing with type inference, OO, good tooling, good libraries, has JS externs for most big libraries and easy JS interoperability, IDEs with good tools (including a fantastic VIM plugin called Vaxe), etc...

And of course Haxe also has its own platform, or can compile to native code... Just saying.

Of course Dart has Dartium, which could one day be the future...

gtaylor4• 12 years ago

Haxe has all your pros and more...

Once again, I don't care. The OP was about a Dart release, and I was sharing my experience with Dart. Haxe doesn't interest me in the least, it's something entirely different for my usage case.

fidotron4• 12 years ago

Politics aside, I find it interesting Dart isn't getting much traction at this point. It seems it should be in a similar position to Java during the first wave, but it clearly isn't.

By itself it's clearly not bad, it's just not better enough than what is there already to suffer the inter-ecosystem pain with native JS. Since it can't do anything JS can't the only selling point it really has is to build large JS systems in some other safer language, but we've been there before with GWT, and that didn't set the world on fire either.

WoodenChair2• 12 years ago

I think it's still early days. There are large projects underway in Dart, like Spark. Once an app that everyone is using is written in Dart, I think it will spur further adoption. With that said, there has been clear growth - as an outsider not on the team, to me that growth looks linear rather than exponential, but it's steady and clearly there. Of course inclusion in Chrome or Android will mean sudden exponential growth perhaps.

RamiK• 12 years ago

Java (Vs. Visual C++) had the industry and Academia trying to break free from Microsoft's grip by going cross-platform and later in-browser.

Dart just doesn't have that kind of driving force going for it.

fidotron4• 12 years ago

True, I had missed that.

Maybe it's that environments mean much more than languages, and with Java the JVM was the killer thing which dragged the language with it. Spark might be that killer platform for Dart, but it strikes me as wishful thinking, especially with players like github coming into that side of the market.

tarpden• 12 years ago

Is pub.dartlang.org Dart's "CPAN"?

I don't know Dart, but it looks as if you need a Google account to upload packages to that central package repo. Is that correct?

Dart Lang 1.2 Released

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