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Show HN: I made a 2D game engine in Dart

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Re: Show HN: I made a 2D game engine in Dart

#11

Post by freitzzz »

socalgal2 wrote: post #9

I hope this isn't off topic. What is the draw of Dart? In other words, what does it claim to do special or emphasize over other langauges? Like if you were going to try to convince someone they should give Dart a try, what reasons would you give?

I would say that the best benefits are:

- Cross Compilation (even wasm and js) out of the box - Simple concurrency model, similar to NodeJS - Ability to use it on a popular cross platform framework (flutter) - Hot reload capibilities (has JIT and AOT mode) - Strong developer tool chain

All of these are built on top of a language that has a pretty syntax and supports many language paradigms.

The biggest con is the (weak) package ecosystem and community.

Re: Show HN: I made a 2D game engine in Dart

#13

Post by sgt »

socalgal2 wrote: post #9

I hope this isn't off topic. What is the draw of Dart? In other words, what does it claim to do special or emphasize over other langauges? Like if you were going to try to convince someone they should give Dart a try, what reasons would you give?

Having developed Flutter apps for a few years now (albeit not full time), I have to say that Dart is simply a pleasure to work in. The language - at least - doesn't hold you back at all. I guess it's kinda like Java should have been.

Re: Show HN: I made a 2D game engine in Dart

#14

Post by sgt »

freitzzz wrote: post #11
socalgal2 wrote: post #9

I hope this isn't off topic. What is the draw of Dart? In other words, what does it claim to do special or emphasize over other langauges? Like if you were going to try to convince someone they should give Dart a try, what reasons would you give?

I would say that the best benefits are: - Cross Compilation (even wasm and js) out of the box - Simple concurrency model, similar to NodeJS - Ability to use it on a popular cross platform framework (flutter) - Hot reload capibilities (has JIT and AOT mode) - Strong developer tool chain All of these are built on top of a language that has a pretty syntax and supports many language paradigms. The biggest con is the (we…

I think it's also important generally speaking - not just Dart/Flutter, but really any language ecosystem, to not blindly start adding packages. You'll end up with conflicts and Dart is no exception. Sometimes it is sensible to vendor a library into your own source code tree, or just build it yourself ("Own it").

Re: Show HN: I made a 2D game engine in Dart

#16

Post by [deleted] »

leecommamichael wrote: post #4

> An easy-to-use, high-performance 2D game library for Dart. This is one of those things you say to interest people. To put their concerns to rest that it might not be able to make the game they want. It doesn't really mean anything. No absolute measurements or relative comparisons.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I made a 2D game engine in Dart

#17

Post by IshKebab »

socalgal2 wrote: post #9

I hope this isn't off topic. What is the draw of Dart? In other words, what does it claim to do special or emphasize over other langauges? Like if you were going to try to convince someone they should give Dart a try, what reasons would you give?

The language is a little nicer than Typescript (though not in all ways), the performance is better and the tooling is excellent. Even better than Go's. And it can be AoT compiled to a self-contained binary or transpiled to Javascript.

The LSP server in particular is amazingly fast and reliable - better than Java IDEs. It's practically instant from typing something to seeing the squiggles update. C++, Rust, Go, Typescript etc. don't come close.

Obviously there are downsides: relatively tiny ecosystem, sometimes weird syntax (why is a match expression and match statement different??), this very annoying issue that I see remains unsolved after 5 years: https://github.com/dart-lang/language/issues/1188

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