Google's Dart Programming language comes to Chromium

[still1]

Developers!!! Attention!

An attractive feature of Web programming is a rapid development cycle. Reloading the application after the source code has changed takes a fraction of a second. We want to offer you that same experience when using Dart, and today we?re making Mac and Linux binaries available that integrate the Dart VM into Chromium.

This technology preview allows you to run your Dart programs directly on the Dart VM in Chromium and avoid a separate compilation step. Over time, these programs will take advantage of the VM?s faster performance and lower startup latency.

Dart has been designed from the start to work with the entire modern web, and we?re simultaneously continuing to improve our fast Dart-to-JavaScript compiler. Both the Dart VM and modern JavaScript engines are first-class targets for Dart.

This release of Chromium with Dart VM integration is a technology preview, and should not be used for day-to-day browsing. After more testing and developer feedback, we plan to eventually include the Dart VM in Chrome.

Today?s release of the Chromium + Dart VM integration is another step forward for the open source "batteries included" Dart platform. Our goal is to help you build complex, high performance apps for the modern web,

http://blog.chromium...-with-dart.html

[Tekkerson]

Cool! :D

[funkydude]

Can't believe Google is silly enough to keep pushing this instead of contributing to new versions of ECMAScript, which is the standard.

[Anibal P]

Can't believe Google is silly enough to keep pushing this instead of contributing to new versions of ECMAScript, which is the standard.

Could be that it doesn't suit Google's needs, so they created DART and are nice enough to let others use it too, for free

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Dart reminds me of JScript that MS pushed, before they started aligning with the spec. It's like JS, but not, and other browsers need compatibility code (In the case of Dart, it's a lot of compatibility code, so Chrome would load DART sites faster because it simply has less to load than other browsers)

[Andre S. Veteran]

I really hope this gets popular. Javascript needs to die as soon as possible. It was designed for simple HTML manipulation, not complex applications, and it's a huge pain to work with. The sooner developers switch to something more adapted, the sooner browsers support it, the better for the web as a whole.

Dart isn't the only alternative to Javascript currently: CoffeeScript is also quickly gaining popularity. What makes Dart unique is direct support in the browser through a VM rather than compiling to Javascript (which Dart also supports).

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

Mozilla have already said they won't support Dart, Google's the only one pushing it.

The only thing Dart really has over JavaScript is classes, and they were only dropped from the latest JavaScript revision because they couldn't agree on the syntax.

[funkydude]

I really hope this gets popular. Javascript needs to die as soon as possible. It was designed for simple HTML manipulation, not complex applications, and it's a huge pain to work with. The sooner developers switch to something more adapted, the sooner browsers support it, the better for the web as a whole.

Dart isn't the only alternative to Javascript currently: CoffeeScript is also quickly gaining popularity. What makes Dart unique is direct support in the browser through a VM rather than compiling to Javascript (which Dart also supports).

You have no idea what you're talking about, I guess you've never even bothered to research it. ECMAScript has evolved over many versions, you seem to be under the delusion that we're using a 15 year old language.

The latest version (5.1) was pushed out in June last year. The new version is currently in development but Google just wants to make the web its own instead of contributing, like Microsoft stupidly tried to do 10 years ago. See: http://www.ecmascript.org/ & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript and learn something. There's also http://test262.ecmascript.org/ to test how compliant your browser is, a test which up until recently IE9 was king of.

[Andre S. Veteran]

Mozilla have already said they won't support Dart, Google's the only one pushing it.

They don't have to, it'll be compiled to JS like every other non-JS language out there currently used to develop large-scale web application. If it gets really popular, then they'll probably change their stance and provide direct support.

You have no idea what you're talking about, I guess you've never even bothered to research it.

Don't you find it ironic to make an uninformed claim (you have no idea of my work or research experience) that my claims were uninformed?

Anyway, wrong and wrong. :rolleyes:

ECMAScript has evolved over many versions, you seem to be under the delusion that we're using a 15 year old language.

But you are. Your array is still kinda-but-not-really an object, and you can still accidentally hide global variables, and order of iteration for foreach loops is still not defined, and white space matters in places it should not because of semi-colon auto-insertion, and the scoping rules for "this" are still as broken as ever and as they always will be, etc. Javascript gets patches, but the patches can't fix bugs that would break backward compatibility.

If it's not Dart it'll be something else. Languages like CoffeeScript, Script#, and countless others are quickly gaining in popularity. They use the same compile-to-JS approach as Dart. What Dart has going for it is support by a large company with lots of money, and one that makes a popular, cross-platform web browser.

[The_Decryptor Veteran]

They don't have to, it'll be compiled to JS like every other non-JS language out there currently used to develop large-scale web application. If it gets really popular, then they'll probably change their stance and provide direct support.

...

Yeah, you can compile Dart code to JS, but of course that adds lots of overhead (Your "Hello World!" code becomes 17,259 lines of JavaScript). You can compile C/C++ (I hear they're even more popular) to JavaScript, that doesn't mean Mozilla and MS are going to drop JavaScript and adopt C in it's place.

If you're going to replace something, you don't have to just match it functionality wise, you have to vastly exceed it. Just having classes and a few less quirks isn't enough (especially since JS could/is getting those additions and fixes)

[Andre S. Veteran]

Yeah, you can compile Dart code to JS, but of course that adds lots of overhead (Your "Hello World!" code becomes 17,259 lines of JavaScript).

That's the cost of the entire framework, without any effort to remove unused code. With Google Closure Compiler this gets trimmed down to 2000 lines, an amount comparable to jQuery, which every website uses today.

If you're going to replace something, you don't have to just match it functionality wise, you have to vastly exceed it. Just having classes and a few less quirks isn't enough (especially since JS could/is getting those additions and fixes).

It's enough that Office Web is written in Script# rather than Javascript, and that this paradigm of languages that compile to Javascript is quickly gaining in popularity. It would be nice if a new language became the norm.

Perhaps Dart isn't the best we can hope for, I haven't put that much thought into it, but I certainly do hope the world moves away from Javascript.

[duble0]

On ‎19‎/‎02‎/‎2012 at 10:17 PM, Tekkerson said:

Cool!

could be cool, but I hate propietary language!...flash and silverligh are failing examples!

[+Fahim S. MVC]

2 hours ago, duble0 said:

could be cool, but I hate propietary language!...flash and silverligh are failing examples!

Everything starts by being proprietary 

[adrynalyne]