Dart 1.5

http://news.dartlang.org/2014/06/dart-15-makes-it-easier-to-develop-for.html

by dboyd • 12 years ago

160 160 12 years ago

news.dartlang.org

ben336• 12 years ago

Is anybody using Dart for significant production code outside of Google? (Not mocking, genuinely curious to hear whats being done with it)

mda2• 12 years ago

https://www.dartlang.org/community/who-uses-dart.html

gsnedders3• 12 years ago

Surprisingly few Google properties on there, I must say. Yes, many most certainly have large existing code-bases, but that it doesn't include things like the new Google Maps (which, AIUI, has relatively little in common with the old version) seems… interesting.

smizell• 12 years ago

I think Blossom [1] switched to it. They had some articles on their blog about the switch [2].

[1] https://www.blossom.io/ [2] http://www.ramen.io/post/46936028144/we-are-switching-to-dar...

tosh• 12 years ago

Thanks for the mention (CEO here).

We're super happy with Dart & really excited about polymer. Love the language & platform in general.

We'll put out some essays, code snippets & lessons learned in the next few days :)

Stay tuned.

adrianlmm5• 12 years ago

I use Dart in production, it has its advatages like:

1.- It is better than JavaScript, is like using C# with a litle mix of Java.

2.- It comes with its own libraries, no more underscore.js or other patch libraries that JS needs, it is already in the toolkit.

3.- It comes with the Dart Editor, where you can debug your code easily, for scalable projects I find this to be invaluable.

4.- It will run in all your browsers, because it will export your code to JavaScript, but not only export it, it will optimize it and will run really fast.

5.- The pub library, go to pub.dartlang.org and you will find lots of packages that you can install and use, like a bootjack, a bootstrap port in Dart.

There are prolly many more, but these are the ones that come to my head right now.

But it also has its own problems like:

1.- No Dart support for Chrome yet and we don't know if there will ever be at this point.

2.- The generated JavaScript will be huge, and I mean huge, mine is like 460k per file and I'm not using polymer, when I used polymer the generated JavaScript was over one megabyte, just insane in the cloud.

3.- Get use to regressions, with every point update I've have issues, I upgraded from 1.4 to 1.5 two days ago, now my code is broken It runs, but it will for example run futures twice, So I went back to 1.4 for now, I had some other issues with UTF when migrating from 1.3 to 1.4 so, get use to.

4.- They are slow fixing bugs, looks like polymer and speed are their priorities, but when you need something trivial that other languajes have had for years and you report a bug it will get ignored, I've waited for 18 months and my open bugs are not fixed yet.

I would say that Dart is nice and you should give it a chance.

GrandTheftR• 12 years ago

Given the size of the generated JS file, do you find it is an issue?

u124556• 12 years ago

Does it have anything like AngularJS?

pyre• 12 years ago

2.- The generated JavaScript will be huge, and I mean huge, mine is like 460k per file and I'm not using polymer, when I used polymer the generated JavaScript was over one megabyte, just insane in the cloud.

If you include all of your 'standard' libraries in a JS app, it can be pretty big. I basically pull everything together for an Ember app I work on, and all-told it's ~3MB prior to minification. Minification takes it down to ~1.5MB, and Gzip-compression on the server takes it sub-1MB (can't recall the number off-hand). It's not that far off from what you might have in a JS-heavy app.

sethladd7• 12 years ago

Thanks for the helpful feedback! The latest version of Polymer.dart removes the need for reflection at compile time, and our output is much smaller today. Curious when you last tried compiling a Polymer Dart app?

[disclaimer: I work for the Dart team.]

amartya916• 12 years ago

Yup. At Sendbloom.co we have used Dart to build a tool that is used by sales people to send out email campaigns. The tool is inspired by quartz composer/Max MSP's interaction paradigms (drag-and-drop visual programming). As someone else mentioned, Dart code can be fairly verbose, but it is very readable and programming with it is a joy when compared to writing vanilla javascript/jquery. I'd be happy to answer if you have any other questions about Dart.

spankalee8• 12 years ago

I would love to see a demo of that!

And how are you finding Dart to be verbose? In my experience it can be more concise than JS because of short lambdas, no function keyword, method cascades, real classes, the fluent Iterable and Stream interfaces.

On the other hand, I see some Dart programmers use a lot of classes and type all their variables. I'm curious what ended up being verbose for you.

msie2• 12 years ago

I was at last year's Google IO and a lot of people were asking the Dart representatives about whether Dart was going to be supported in Chrome (not just Chromium). We were told the team was holding off because of performance considerations. It has been ONE WHOLE YEAR since then.

mda2• 12 years ago

There were changes needed on Blink side (Oilpan project) and this sort of things take time.

Oilpan project: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YtfurcyKFS0hxPOnC3U6...

You can track Darts's performance here: https://www.dartlang.org/performance/

comex• 12 years ago

Why do you want it to be supported in Chrome? Any performance improvements seen by your users won't apply to those using any other browser.

rdtsc• 12 years ago

Any performance improvements seen by your users won't apply to those using any other browser.

But it will apply to those using Chrome (their performance benchmarks show consistent improvement, sometimes up to 2x) and it will be using a better language for all the other ones.

Igglyboo2• 12 years ago

Because then his userbase goes from being an extremely small niche(chromium is probably less than 1%) to a much larger niche(chrome is more than 30%).

adrianlmm5• 12 years ago

I will say that you won't need to rely on JavaScript, .dart files size are a lot smaller and the code starts and execute faster.

ahoge4• 12 years ago

Any performance improvements seen by your users won't apply to those using any other browser.

It will be still about as fast as regular JavaScript.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Chrome already comes with NaCl which nobody else but Google uses it. Do we want another VM inside Chrome that nobody else will adopt?

And now they're putting Android inside ChromeOS, too, just because they don't want to admit Android itself would work better on notebooks (given the right interface) than ChromeOS.

rwallace• 12 years ago

I'd much rather they keep holding off. We've had more than enough of big companies fragmenting the ecosystem by making their own languages, file formats etc. because they can. As things currently stand, Dart compiles to JavaScript, which is exactly the right way to do it; that way it's a tool that's available if you want to use it, but it doesn't screw up interoperability.

macspoofing5• 12 years ago

As things currently stand, Dart compiles to JavaScript, which is exactly the right way to do it

That was never going to change. The idea, as far as I understand it, is for Dart to be executed natively where there is a Dart VM. Where there isn't, the dart2js output would be executed. The DOM itself would be unchanged. I think that's reasonable. In fact, more than reasonable, that's just a good idea.

kasperset2• 12 years ago

I would like to use it but Javascript Frameworks and libraries are being developed so rapidly that it gets difficult to choose Dart and plus it is yet to mature. I may be wrong.

spankalee8• 12 years ago

Dart's been very stable for a while now, and has a really good library ecosystem already.

Personally, I wouldn't worry too much about JavaScript frameworks evolving rapidly, just go with anything the supports Web Components. In JavaScript that would be Polymer, X-Tags or Bosonic. In Dart that's Polymer. Or, in either you can write directly to the platform APIs without a library.

In my mind there is BWC and AWC: Before Web Components and After Web Components. The world or web apps is undergoing a paradigm shift on par with AJAX right now, and I wouldn't use any framework that doesn't support Web Components.

kasperset2• 12 years ago

I have been looking at Polymer library and it looks promising.

gress• 12 years ago

Has this version been submitted to ECMA?

munificent13• 12 years ago

Yes: http://news.dartlang.org/2014/02/standardizing-dart-1st-ecma...

caycep• 12 years ago

This may be a noob question on my part, but my understanding is Dart and Rust are 2 separate efforts to come up with something to supplant javascript?

carlosdp• 12 years ago

As in Mozilla Rust? That is a systems language, nothing to do with JS (other than it is being used to build Servo, Mozilla's experimental new parallel browser engine)

pohl2• 12 years ago

While it's true that Dart is aimed at the sort of territory dominated by JavaScript (client-side code in the browser), Rust is instead aiming towards the sort of use cases one might choose C++ for today – for example, as the language used to create the browser itself.

phn• 12 years ago

I think rust wants to be a system language, akin to C rather than javascript. Dart, yes, a different language running inside the browser.

josteink• 12 years ago

No. Rust is a systems language meant to displace c and c++.

Dart is Google's me-too attempt at creating something which compiles to JavaScript. It borrows heavily from java and generates equally bloated code.

OK, so maybe last sentence is a bit over the top critical, but last I checked, hello world in dart rendered in at 100kb [1] of js and dependencies.

[1] http://lostechies.com/jimmybogard/2011/10/12/the-dart-hello-...

gsnedders3• 12 years ago

The aim of Dart was really to provide a second VM in browser with a compatibility dart2js compilation mode. It was never intended to always be used with dart2js.

Dart 1.5.1 produces nowhere near that much for the same input, producing just 14KB (see [1]). Yes, arguably still too verbose, but note that much of the overhead is essentially a Dart-compatibility support library, so remains constant as the amount of Dart increases.

[1] https://gist.github.com/gsnedders/ab101d73bc91d2782e0a

conradk• 12 years ago

Dart is not meant to enable building "hello world" apps though.

macspoofing5• 12 years ago

It borrows heavily from java and generates equally bloated code.

I don't mind Java, but I don't see how a) being compared to Java is a negative given the alternative is JavaScript (which as a language is terrible) and b) how Dart borrows heavily from Java.

Re b), there are enough differences between the two (e.g. dart has optional static typing, mixins and js-type closures, and is single-threaded and interpreted) that the similarities are completely superficial.

cromwellian2• 12 years ago

If the Dart team decided to put a lot of effort into it, I bet they could get that down, but to what benefit? The average application isn't a hello world and so most of the code that isn't being pruned is likely system runtime code that most apps need.

I decided to try such an experiment with GWT recently, since the same kind of unfair microbenchmark has been used against it.

I detail how I reduced the hello world from 2205 bytes to 710 bytes here: Th3e Hello World Challenge https://plus.google.com/+RayCromwell/posts/VK8URgZiLbS

What how did I do it? By not registering any global exception handlers, or any async tasks, and arranging for the compiler to be able to optimize away the unused runtime stuff.

But how likely is it that no one wants to catch exceptions and print pretty stack traces? Or to schedule microtasks to run at the end of the event loop?

It's not a realistic test.

arscan• 12 years ago

You might be confusing Rust with Typescript, which is Microsoft's attempt to "improve" javascript.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TypeScript

luos• 12 years ago

I tried dart just last week with dart IDE (1.4.3). It was good, much better than javascript.

My observations: Installing dependencies was easy. Types help a lot. The IDE is good but sometimes can not show the correct type or just shows dynamic, the autocomplete is usable if you write `this.` . Usable for a modify-refresh cycle but the attached chromium seems to be a little buggy (on xubuntu the window is not correctly drawn). In-browser exceptions are a little cryptic to read. Very similar syntax to java/c#. Good stdlib (I tried async/browser/math). Little cumbersome calling JS but it works. Bult-in factory pattern, setters/getters.

I think they could let users create multiline functions with the => operator (currently only one line). :)

I tried to pub my code, but it did not work for some reasons. I haven't tried since then so I don't know what kind of js it generates.

munificent13• 12 years ago

Hi! I'm on the Dart team. If you'd like, I'll try to answer any questions you have.

msoad• 12 years ago

Hi, I have two questions:

1. One big issue with JavaScript applications is that they are single threaded. Does Dart/Web Component platform provide any solution to this?

2. Will we see another UI rendering layer other than DOM for Dart?

munificent13• 12 years ago

One big issue with JavaScript applications is that they are single threaded. Does Dart/Web Component platform provide any solution to this?

Because Dart compiles to JavaScript, we're limited in some ways in what we can do here. We do, of course, support Web Workers, but those have a bunch of constraints that make them difficult to use in practice.

We have tried to make single-threaded async programming more pleasant. In particular, Dart comes with built-in, very rich Future and Stream types. Even better, those are deeply integrated into the code libraries, including the DOM.

Every asynchronous DOM operation in Dart returns a future, which is much more pleasant to deal with than raw callbacks. Likewise, things like events are exposed as streams, so you can map and transform them like any other stream of data.

I gave a talk on Dart at Strange Loop last year[1] that talks a bit about this. Skip to around 38 minutes.

2. Will we see another UI rendering layer other than DOM for Dart?

Good question! There are a few different frameworks that people have built for Dart that expose their own ways of expressing UI. I think they all ultimately fall back to the DOM because that's the primitive the browser gives you, but what you as a programmer deal with may be fairly removed from that.

These days, I mostly do command-line Dart stuff, so I don't have a good lay of the land here.

[1] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/dart-introduction

pohl2• 12 years ago

Has there been much internal dogfooding, such that some external-facing thing I use is really powered by JavaScript that came out of dart2js?

If I'm using GWT, should I be thinking about using Dart instead?

munificent13• 12 years ago

Has there been much internal dogfooding

Yes. We on the team, of course, use Dart heavily. My day job is working on pub, the package manager for Dart, and a slew of other libraries, all written in Dart. Our API[1] doc site is written in Dart.

Likewise, we have an increasing number of internal customers who give us the kind of feedback you only get from someone who isn't obligated to see your project succeed. :)

Obviously, a bunch of customers we can't talk about, but I can say that Google Elections and Google Fiber use Dart. Google has an internal sales tool also written using Dart and Angular.dart.

[1] https://api.dartlang.org

spankalee8• 12 years ago

re: GWT. GWT is still actively developed and making progress. I just talked with some GWT team members at I/O, and they're adding better JS-interop (like we are), incremental compilation, and are looking at web components support. One thing we talked about that would be nice is GWT-Dart interop, (if we get everything else done).

I'm biased, being on the Dart team, but I think Dart is a much nicer language that Java, so I would choose Dart for a new project. GWT might still be a good choice though if you have a large existing investment in Java that you can repurpose in the client. Many enterprises have hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of Java code that aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

So, should you think about Dart? I guess that depends on how ready or willing you are to migrate your code away form Java. If you were thinking about rewriting in JavaScript, then I'd definitely say consider Dart. If you're happy with Java and GWT, then you can keep going that direction.

lmkg• 12 years ago

How well does Dart interact with JavaScript, especially libraries that are asynchronously loaded? I know that the Dart compiler is a whole-program optimizer, and I get the impression that Dart wants to own all the code on the page.

In my line of work (web analytics), I have to use third-party JavaScript libraries in order to integrate tools onto my page, like Adobe Analytics (formerly Omniture SiteCatalyst) or IBM CoreMetrics or WebTrends. Fully instrumenting a page generally involves wiring up other JavaScript on the page with event handlers for web analytics functions (e.g. video play/pause/progress, with video name & length as parameters).

Most analytics tools are also moving towards asychronously-loaded script-injection techniques, like Adobe DTM or Ensighten. These usually include the ability to selectively load relevant libraries, like only having video tracking on video pages.

What's Dart's story for interacting with tools like that?

munificent13• 12 years ago

How well does Dart interact with JavaScript, especially libraries that are asynchronously loaded?

I'm not the best person to ask about JS interop, but I know it's something that other people on the team put a lot of effort into.

I know that the Dart compiler is a whole-program optimizer, and I get the impression that Dart wants to own all the code on the page.

dart2js likes to have access to all of the Dart code while it's compiling, so it can do global optimization, but as far as I know, that doesn't affect JS interop. Talking to JS is all dynamically dispatched at runtime, so the compiler doesn't really care about it.

(We can also do deferred loading of Dart code now too, though I don't know the details.)

What's Dart's story for interacting with tools like that?

Beyond the general JS interop story, I don't know if we've done anything specific there. I believe you should be able to talk to JS code even if it's loaded much later.

timothya• 12 years ago

You can read more about the JS-Interop support here: https://www.dartlang.org/articles/js-dart-interop/

jmesserly5• 12 years ago

How well does Dart interact with JavaScript, especially libraries that are asynchronously loaded? I know that the Dart compiler is a whole-program optimizer, and I get the impression that Dart wants to own all the code on the page.

Great question. Generally dart:js will let you do interop: https://www.dartlang.org/articles/js-dart-interop/. It's designed to interact pretty well with the dart2js compiler. However it feels a lot like you're using a foreign function interface. For example, calling a the global method Object.keys is: js.context['Object'].callMethod('keys', [obj]);

For Custom Elements (one of the new web components specs) we did something better: you can register the Dart wrapper type associated with that element. Then whenever you get one of those elements, it automatically looks like the Dart type. We used this heavily in the new core_elements and paper_elements packages. Here's an example of defining a type like that: https://github.com/dart-lang/core-elements/blob/master/lib/c...

Ultimately we'd like to make something similar for all JavaScript objects and expose it from dart:js. That would make interop almost seamless (especially if we could generate the types from DefinitelyTyped's APIs).

spankalee8• 12 years ago

Hi, I'm on the Dart team too and maintain dart:js which allows you to call JavaScript from Dart. I'm a little busy right this second, but ask any questions and I'll be glad to answer them!

macspoofing5• 12 years ago

Dart in Chrome?

Dart on Android?

Will the Dart IDE look correctly on Windows 8 high-dpi devices? (I know that's partially an Eclipse problem)

In fact, what is the future of Dart? Is it just a complement to browser-based JavaScript?

munificent13• 12 years ago

Dart in Chrome?

We're working on it! Having two language virtual machines with objects that can contain references to each other is quite technically challenging. There's a bunch of work to be done to address that[1]. Along the way, we're working with the larger Chrome team to address any other requirements they have.

Dart on Android?

The Dart VM does run on Android right now [2]. My understanding is that the performance is impressive relative to Dalvik/ART, though don't quote me on that.

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink... [2]: https://code.google.com/p/dart/wiki/Android

Will the Dart IDE look correctly on Windows 8 high-dpi devices?

Aside from the splash screen, it looks nice and sharp on my retina Mac.

In fact, what is the future of Dart? Is it just a complement to browser-based JavaScript?

We're working to make it a comprehensive web language, both client and server-side.

crncosta• 12 years ago

Thanks for coming to answer questions. How this 1.5 release is related with the work in progress in the Ecma TC52 for Dart Standardization?

munificent13• 12 years ago

The two are mostly decoupled. The core language hasn't changed much since 1.0, and I think TC 52 is mostly focused on nailing down stuff that either shipped before 1.5 or won't appear until after.

I don't know many details here, though. The committee is still pretty new and the communication channels are still being set up.

_glass• 12 years ago

Is there any chance there will be more support for Dart on Android?[1]

[1] More than https://code.google.com/p/dart/wiki/Android

daw___• 12 years ago

You may want to follow this thread: Support building native Android applications with Dart

https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=19266

lukasm• 12 years ago

Planning to build NodeJS like env in Dart?

I'd like to Dart to happen. What worries my is that Dart has Java EE mentality. Hipster programmers won't touch it and lack of traction may kill the project. What's the solution? Performance may be a great USP. Rewrite Gmail in Dart, so tools like Streak, Rapportive and other extensions won't kill the performance.

munificent13• 12 years ago

Planning to build NodeJS like env in Dart?

We aren't planning it, we've already done it. Dart comes with a command-line VM with a full-featured (IO, networking, etc.) set of libraries[1].

The performance is quite good and getting better[2], from what I understand.

[1] https://api.dartlang.org/apidocs/channels/stable/dartdoc-vie... [2]: https://www.dartlang.org/performance/io/

sethladd7• 12 years ago

Hi! The Dart VM does run on the command line, and can access files, directories, sockets, HTTP, web sockets, and more. The Dart VM is an asynchronous light-weight server. I don't think Dart has a Java EE mentality. Far from it. :)

[disclaimer: I work on the Dart team.]

mythz11• 12 years ago

There's a bunch of web frameworks that already as well:

Redstone is becoming increasingly popular: http://luizmineo.github.io/redstone.dart/

Whilst I've built a simple Express-like API: https://github.com/dartist/express

Which also includes a complete port of node's popular jade view engine: https://github.com/dartist/jaded

ahoge4• 12 years ago

The SDK is shipped with a standalone version of the VM which can do I/O (via the 'dart:io' package). You can use it to write command line applications and web servers. Basically, it's like Node right off the bat.

I/O performance increased drastically with 1.3. The performance is tracked over here:

https://www.dartlang.org/performance/io/

1.4 added experimental support for ServerSocket references, which allow you to share a socket across isolates (~"workers"):

https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!topic/misc/...

_random_2• 12 years ago

What is Google's vision for Dart going forward? Why is it not a primary language for Android?

I really like Dart. Google is pretty much the only company trying to break the tyranny of JS in browsers.

(e.g. Microsoft clearly said that they are betting on C# and .NET as their main offering for everything - would be nice if Google was capable of this sort of direct messages)

YousefED• 12 years ago

I actually think microsoft is very much behind non-.net technologies as well nowadays.

My experience with their TypeScript initiative has been really smooth, feels like they're trying to improve JS instead of inventing something new (by sticking as close as possible to the ES.next specs). The generated JS is very close to the original, both in size as readability.

alptrv• 12 years ago

Are there any plans to introduce generators or async/await?

munificent13• 12 years ago

Yes! From Gilad:

We are working out a proposal that is somewhat similar to async-await in C#. Again, we hope to finalize that in time for the next rev of the standard. Details as soon as coherent articles explaining it all can be put together.

_greim_• 12 years ago

I'd like to know too. As clunky as JS is, generators make possible some pretty interesting stuff[1] that I would miss in Dart.

[1] https://github.com/visionmedia/co

mmozeiko• 12 years ago

Why does "Dart SDK (64-bit Windows)" contain 32-bit Windows dart.exe binary?

munificent13• 12 years ago

I recall hearing someone at the office mention that, but I don't know the details. File a bug or ask on the mailing list and someone who knows better than me can sort it out.

mraleph3• 12 years ago

Up until recently due to some issues with build scripts and MSVC parameters our bots building 64-bit SDK on Windows were just silently building 32-binaries. I have fixed[1] it couple of weeks ago, but my fix did not make it into 1.5. Sadly it's not just a build script fix, but also some changes in Dart VM to accommodate for ABI differences, so we decided not to merge. Next release will have 64-bit dart binary on Windows. Bleeding edge SDKs already contain correct version of dart binary.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/detail?r=37078

bluepill2• 12 years ago

Dart rocks, thanks to team for the great work

gozzoo• 12 years ago

What is your take on swift? Do you think dart can borrow some ideas from swift? Most of it is just syntax sugar, but it is very pleasant to look and work with.

mythz11• 12 years ago

The main thing I miss from Swift is its extensibility letting you extend primitive types like Arrays or Strings, this lets you easily add LINQ-like capabilities even tho Swift doesn't ship with many, see: https://github.com/mythz/swift-linq-examples

Dart comes with a rich functional and Stream API's on collections so most of the time you wont need to extend it (same LINQ examples in Dart: https://github.com/dartist/101LinqSamples), but unfortunately you can't extend built-in (or external) types which means you need to use top-level methods which can break-up the flow of your beautiful expression flows. Extensions is also important for minimizing unnecessary abstraction and maximizing re-usability since you can extend without being forced to create foreign wrapper API's.

IMO Extensions are one of the most important traits for keeping a minimal friction-free language, something I see Go and Swift benefiting a lot from.

Dart does have powerful mixins (https://www.dartlang.org/articles/mixins/) but you can only mixin into classes you define (i.e. not built-in or external types).

But otherwise I find Dart's optional-typing a tonne more productive than Swift's strict type inference / generic enforcement, Dart also has a rich consistent library, integrated package manager, static analyzer and overall better development experience.

Although there's little overlap as Swift is mainly for creating iOS/OSX desktop apps and Dart is focused on rich Web Apps. Basically the only times when you'd be able to choose one or the other is in command-line scripts, I'd still prefer to use Dart for.

leccine• 12 years ago

What does Dart do to improve/address security for web? Is there any advantage of using Dart over JS in terms of security?

Thank you.

munificent13• 12 years ago

Yes, there is!

I don't know the details, but I believe sanitize uses of innerHTML to avoid some common security vulnerabilities. More details here: https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!topic/misc/...

derengel• 12 years ago

How practical is today to start with Dart for web apps instead of Javascript? speaking from someone who doesn't know JS.

mythz11• 12 years ago

It's very familiar if you're a C# or Java developer and provides a rich, clean and consistent API library which abstracts away JavaScript and DOM apis: https://api.dartlang.org/apidocs/channels/stable/dartdoc-vie...

The code-labs provide pretty good, practical walk-thru's: http://io2014codelabs.appspot.com/static/codelabs/dart-start...

rezistik3• 12 years ago

One of the things that for some reason really confuses me about Dart even though it probably shouldn't is it's status as being full stack.

I really want to use AngularDart for the front end of an application I am using and I would like to use Rails for the back end as well as some static content. I can't seem to find an easy way to make that happen. In addition, how does Dart interact with existing JavaScript libraries?

mythz11• 12 years ago

You can find JS Interop docs at: https://www.dartlang.org/articles/js-dart-interop/

IMO integration is as straight-forward as it gets, basically just use a HTTP Client to call JSON services. Here's an AngularDart example for calling a REST backend: http://japhr.blogspot.com/2013/10/http-requests-in-angularda...

I've also created a JsonClient that provides a terse API for calling JSON services: https://github.com/dartist/json_client

coldtea2• 12 years ago

If Google is even half interested in Dart (which is seems to be, since it pays for the Dart team), why doesn't it do any proper moves to push it, besides for the browser which ain't gonna fly by itself?

1) Properly package and add "batteries" for a server side version of Dart. Pay some team to write a proper and complete Rails/Django or at least Flask level framework -- and document it.

2) Make a Google version of node.js using Dart instead of v8.

3) Even better, merge (1) and (2) for a serve side framework with both good syncrhonous (e.g Django like) and async (e.g Node like) story.

4) Support Dart as a first tier development language for Android.

sethladd7• 12 years ago

[disclaimer: I work on the Dart team.]

1) Dart VM runs on the command line and server. You can access files, directories, sockets, HTTP, Web sockets, SSL, and more. So the core functionality is all there, out of the box.

2) When people say "node.js", they usually mean at least two different things. Forgive me if I'm assuming too much, but I'll try to answer. Node.js is "javascript + v8 + server", and the equivalent for Dart is "dart + dart vm + server". So we've delivered that. Sometimes, when people say "node.js", they mean "express + v8", and Dart has "shelf + dart vm". You can check out the shelf package here: https://pub.dartlang.org/packages/shelf

3) There are a few emerging server-side frameworks out there (I mentioned shelf above). Dart VM is asynchronous, so you'll get a Node-esque experience. There aren't plans to make a fully sync server API.

4) That would be cool!

stesch3• 12 years ago

I wouldn't use Dart until this bug is fixed: https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=13285

jmesserly5• 12 years ago

fyi, I think most of my original complaints in that bug are either fixed, or largely mitigated. I don't think we've had any issues for over a year now (since Dart 1.0). I still wish it was even more bulletproof, but it isn't scary anymore like it was. Google is building lots of stuff in Dart too, so we're on the hook if something breaks.

stesch3• 12 years ago

Dart doesn't work correctly in Firefox 31 Beta. People will have to recompile all their Dart apps next month.

pm90• 12 years ago

How does dart compare to coffeescript?

munificent13• 12 years ago

This is a very simplified answer, but here's my take:

CoffeeScript says that the main problems with JS are the inelegant C-style syntax and a few semantic trip wires. It addresses those while still keeping the underlying semantics, APIs and ecosystem.

If what drives you up the wall about JS is stuff like the DOM, or JS's object model, CoffeeScript won't help you much. If you are OK with how JS behaves and like the very large JS ecosystem, CoffeeScript can be a nice fit.

Dart takes a much larger semantic step away from JS. Syntactically, it's more similar to JS than CoffeeScript is. It sticks with braces and statements, and the whole C kit and kaboodle.

However, semantically, it's much different. It has a full-featured class system with inheritance, mixins, getters, setters, operator overloading, etc. It has a static type system so you get the nice tooling experience you expect from a language like Java or C#. It also completely revamps the DOM APIs to (hopefully) be more rational, modern and consistent.

The cost, though, is that interacting with the existing JavaScript world is a little more difficult. You can interop, of course, but it isn't as seamless as CoffeeScript.

WorldWideWayne2• 12 years ago

I just don't trust Google to do languages and developer tools very well. They don't seem to depend on developers enough to bend over backwards for us the way that Microsoft does.

Plus, they seem to want to use web tech to build native desktop tools all the time and little things like "keyboard acceleration" don't seem to matter to them because there are no standards for that in web-world.

mythz11• 12 years ago

Not sure what you mean: MS has a history of abandoning its developer platforms and frameworks that thier developers have invested in, so much so that there's no longer a clear UI story for building native desktop windows apps, i.e. VB6, Silverlight, WinForms and WPF are all effectively deprecated. Although they have long support life, when they officially abandon a platform they also refuse to Open Source it so others can keep it alive (e.g. VB6 http://bit.ly/KPMUS6). I personally can't see how anyone can put trust into building native Windows desktop apps (i.e. over web apps) given the repeated a history of abandonment.

Even the #1 feature for VS.NET is to continue developing very popular XNA framework: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...

Likewise on the server side there's been history of deprecated frameworks a lot of developers have invested a lot of energy into learning, e.g: .asmx, CSF, WCF, WCF/REST, WSE, WCF DataServices, RIA

Whilst VisualStudio is a great IDE, I find it a subpar experience without R#. The major advantages Dart has over C# is that it still provides an enjoyable experience to develop even without an IDE which also includes support for the most popular text editors: https://www.dartlang.org/tools/ If you like IDE and tooling support, the DartEditor offers a good experience with built-in analyzer, debugging and refactoring support you can expect from a well engineered language.

By contrast, C#'s configuration model, msbuild project format, heavy frameworks and tooling makes it unfeasible to develop without an IDE.

The other major advantage Dart has is that it compiles down to JS where even the compiler is completely self-hosting and runs inside a browser without plugins: http://try.dartlang.org/ Being able to share the same code on client and server and having a single integrated development full-stack experience is a huge win in re-usability and utility.

Another killer feature is that the language and tooling is cross-platform which supports Windows, OSX and Linux. Something .NET devs often miss out on is the value and utility of being able to host apps on cost-effective Linux servers.

Google continues to invest a tonne of resources in Dart and Polymer which are massive undertakings that are providing a much simplified and consistent experience for developing large, complex web apps. Nothing like Dart or Polymer exists. Dart is a platform that transpiles to JS, includes a native Dart VM, an entire toolchain including IDE, analyzer and debugger both in Dart Editor as well as in Chrome, in both the Dart VM as well as debugging with Source maps.

The worlds best VM engineers work on the Dart VM, i.e. the same pedigree responsible for the StrongTalk VM that was later acquired by Sun to form the basis of the world-class Java Hotspot VM that later went on to develop V8, are now leading the development on the Dart VM.

The excellence shows itself in the consistency and minimalism goals in the language, providing a productive, iterative dynamic language experience for fast prototyping with the benefit of static analysis with optional typing when scaling up to a maintainable, well-documented code-base (best of both worlds).

Not only is Dart a productive dynamic language, it also has excellent performance, the best performance of all languages I benchmarked with a port of Peter Norvig's Sudoku solver: https://github.com/dartist/sudoku_solver#benchmarks

seanmcdirmid6• 12 years ago

I'm feeling a little defensive here (disclaimer, MS employee, but I work for MSR, not devdiv):

Not sure what you mean: MS has a history of abandoning its developer platforms and frameworks that thier developers have invested in, so much so that there's no longer a clear UI story for building native desktop windows apps, i.e. VB6, Silverlight, WinForms and WPF are all effectively deprecated.

WPF is still chugging a long strongly even if there aren't so many new features. Visual Studio was recently rewritten in it, and its a very good design with lots of room for encoding desktop apps in the future. I use it daily and cringe at the thought of ever doing something for the web without it.

Whilst VisualStudio is a great IDE, I find it a subpar experience without R#.

I use visual studio just fine without R#. I see no point these days writing code without an IDE, I'm addicted to code completion. Not to mention amazing things are being done with Roslyn.

By contrast, C#'s configuration model, msbuild project format, heavy frameworks and tooling makes it unfeasible to develop without an IDE.

C# is totally usable from the command line, most developers just refer the IDE.

he worlds best VM engineers work on the Dart VM, i.e. the same pedigree responsible for the StrongTalk VM that was later acquired by Sun to form the basis of the world-class Java Hotspot VM that later went on to develop V8, are now leading the development on the Dart VM.

The CLR is one of the best VMs ever (read: very fast), worked on by some of the brightest who are very comparable to the Animorphic crowd. The DLR feature (ability to generate/compile expression trees at run-time) is also very cool and missing from the JVM. If you are into building language run-times, it is an awesome base for a dynamic language.

True: it is only available on Windows, but Mono has made progress as well (most features available sans WPF). I've been thinking about porting my language work [1] over to mono.cairo to see if I can achieve cross platform without going to Java or the web.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/liveprogr...

WorldWideWayne2• 12 years ago

MS has a history of abandoning its developer platforms and frameworks....VB6, Silverlight, WinForms and WPF are all effectively deprecated...Likewise with XNA...CSF, WCF, etc...

"Deprecated" is just a word that means absolutely nothing here since all of those kits are still fully functional on current versions of Windows (including XNA and the server side stuff that you mentioned). And VB6 is 20 years old! You wanna make a bet that your Android, Dart or Go code will run in 20 years? Android code from 2008 won't even run today mate :) Also, when Google deprecates something - it's usually hooked to a service, so there's no hope to keep using it when it's no longer fashionable (like some are doing with VB6, Foxpro and other really old kits).

Whilst VisualStudio is a great IDE, I find it a subpar experience without R#.

And I find the lack of a single IDE built and maintained by Google to be sub-subpar. Visual Studio is superb without R#, but even if you don't think so - at least Microsoft is making life easy by offering an IDE that is tuned specifically for the task at hand instead of using some open source pile of junk that tries to do everything. There's nothing to decide when I need to do .NET - I know what tools to use. Meanwhile Google has no comprehensive strategy here and you're forced to cobble together your own toolkit. Blech.

Another killer feature is that the language and tooling is cross-platform which supports Windows, OSX and Linux.

That's a weakness because "cross-platform" means a crappy non-native Java UI or some half-functional impostor built with HTML - and those tools suck on every platform. No thanks, I like things that are native to my platform please. Besides that, I can certainly do all of my coding on Windows and build and run it on Linux without any problem thanks (because I have been).

I don't really want to spend my time responding to another wall of text or the rest of this one so I'm going to end it here. I will say that Google does some cool stuff in the browser and with Android, but my main point here is that they don't put forth a very comprehensive strategy at all. Most of their developer stuff seems to be created by 20 percenters in their spare time instead of making a concerted effort like Microsoft does.

dannyr• 12 years ago

Anybody knows if there's a free DART PDF Book somewhere?

sethladd7• 12 years ago

Not sure about PDFs, but the text for Dart Up & Running can be found here: https://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and-running/

[disclaimer: I work for the Dart team, and I'm a coauthor of that book.]

bluepill2• 12 years ago

I usually browse the docs when starting with a new topic; the dartlang website has tons of stuff (and the articles are usually kept up to date), it's quite easy to get started.

Rapzid• 12 years ago

Hello, golangs channels and go routines have been quite popular with some. So popular that the clojure guys created core.async and even adopted the "go" command(as a nod I'm assuming?). This works in the JVM via clojurescript.. Has the Dart team considered such a system? Was it brought up when planning the await stuff?

shakethemonkey• 12 years ago

It would give me greater confidence if the first Dart example[1] on the official Dart website did not point to a 404 Not Found.

[1] https://www.dartlang.org/samples/

sethladd7• 12 years ago

Yikes! Not good. I just opened: https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=19708

sethladd7• 12 years ago

I fixed our repo. The next time we push the site, it should be fixed. Thanks for the report!

laughfactory• 12 years ago

I too would like to see a lot more work done on Dart web frameworks (particularly client side) and a lot more documentation/tutorials demonstrating non-trivial real applications which have a complex UI, data binding, and talk to a database on the backend. Right now it's the dearth of documentation/tutorials/books holding me back as I'm on the beginner end of the spectrum--but still very interested in Dart.

Dart 1.5

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