Dart News

> "proprietary" is unfair, and becomes more unfair all the time now that Dart is on its way to ECMA standardization

By "proprietary", I mean only executable by one client.

I had not read about Dart's ECMA standardization process (TC52). I think that's great news, but to be fair, that announcement was made just two days ago:

http://news.dartlang.org/2013/12/ecma-forms-tc52-for-dart-standardization.html

> If Dart is "proprietary," then so is asm.js, Mozilla Persona, Rust, and many other cool things that Mozilla is doing.

I don't think asm.js, Rust, dart2js, or Go are "proprietary" because their implementations are open and their output can be executed by multiple platforms or clients. Dart source files is only executable by Google's Dart VM.

> This is exactly the kind of bad faith presumption that troubles me. Google is trying to push the web forward but in your mind their end game is to break its web properties for every browser except Chrome?

I do not think Google is plotting to create a walled garden (unlike Microsoft of the 1990s). But I think many people at Mozilla worry about future timelines where proprietary systems could be created, even if they are the inadvertent, cumulative result of different product teams' decisions.

Consider Google Hangouts. When Hangouts was launched in May of this year, it included an NPAPI plugin to support other browsers like Firefox. But now, only seven months later, the Hangouts service is very popular but is only accessible from…

I think a few points are worth emphasizing. Dart produces JavaScript that is closer to being correct
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5424680

Dart can produce JavaScript that is faster
http://news.dartlang.org/2013/03/why-dart2js-produces-faster-javascript.html

The JavaScript output of Dart2js works across all modern browsers (IE9 and above, among others.) No browser hacks required.

Having said that, I wish they would stop working on advancing Dart and ship a 1.0 version. It's been 1.5 years since it was announced. Make the advancements in the 1.1 or 2.0 and give the tool developers a solid target to optimize for in 1.0. Let us not have to sell clients on a beta development system, even though that's what I'm doing and it's working, despite some panic when Dart developers break things with breaking changes (which is often.)

Dart VM is an essential part of the Dart ecosystem.

Dart tools: pub's (package manager) client, analyzer, dart2js compiler, etc are all written in Dart.

We have a good story for server side developement and we are not looking to abandon it but rather we are looking to expand it, e.g. we just released a package to facilitate creation of REST APIs[1]. Pub's server side is being rewritten into Dart as we speak[2]

Among cool internal users of Dart VM I could mention Google Fiber - they'll share their experience during the upcoming Dart Summit[3].

[1] http://news.dartlang.org/2015/03/create-your-own-rest-api-with-dart.html

[2] https://github.com/dart-lang/pub-dartlang-dart

[3] https://www.dartlang.org/events/2015/summit/sessions/google-fiber-and-dart/

(disclaimer: I work on the Dart team)

Good question!

The language does not anticipate backwards breaking changes (modulo any bugs we find in the spec), though we expect to add features like mixins.

The libraries are going through changes now, especially with the introduction of the new Streams API: http://news.dartlang.org/2012/11/introducing-new-streams-api.html

The time is good to check out Dart and let us know what features you need for your next commercial project. However, with the libraries evolving right now, I probably wouldn't use Dart for something I need to ship in Q1 of 2013.

We love feedback, and there are a ton of features what work today (package manager, compiler to JavaScript, editor, etc) so we hope to hear from you soon :)

You are right it was. But most people do not track all issues of all projects they depend on. While I'd love to do that, there's simply not much time.

I belive this should have been in an earlier RC or Beta. This way, more people would have tested ot, ir got a chance to read changelog (I follow the blog and check each beta release). If that window was missed, it should have gone for the next major release.

What I see is that Google announced AngularDart (http://news.dartlang.org/2013/11/angular-announces-angulardart.html). Dart has _ prefix for private fields. Then AngularJS team goes ahead and forces the same on the JS implementation.

Seems that there is always some political reason to mess with things at Google.

Okay, thanks!

I was thinking that the decision not to ship with Chrome was very old news, but actually it was just two years ago [1]. Time flies!

Dart for the web is purely a compile-to-JavaScript language now. The last bit will be replacing Dartium with DDC [2].

The Dart VM is still around. It's used in Dart's command-line tools and in Flutter. Also, the Sass compiler is moving from Ruby to Dart. [3]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/25/google-will-not-integrate-its-dart-programming-language-into-chrome/
[2] http://news.dartlang.org/2017/06/dart-124-faster-edit-refresh-cycle-on.html
[3] http://sass.logdown.com/posts/1909151