Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 259 posts

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#141

Post by equasar »

monocularvision wrote: post #120
dangjc wrote: post #102

Flutter seems like the killer app that could revive Dart. In comparison: Javascript For mobile with React: no AOT compile. Relies on loading the entire JS VM which adds startup time and can require bundling a large library on Android. Cannot easily author customized components that render at native speeds. C# For mobile with Xamarin: No hot reload. Dart having its origin as a JS interpreted language had the foundatio…

The main negative with Flutter on iOS is that your app ends up looking like an awful Google app instead of something native.

There's a Cupertino theme.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#142

Post by Daegalus »

munificent wrote: post #97
sbjs wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what killed Dart is that they emphasized their plans to make Dart a first-class scripting language of Chrome, so that you could use instead of JavaScript. This had a lot of backlash from literally everyone, I think mostly because they were bit too hard by IE doing the exact same thing just a few years before. Only after a few years the Dart team changed courses and said "never mind about that VM-inside-Chrome…

I'm on the Dart team and I agree with pretty much all of this. Personal opinion time: Lars and Kasper, the original leads and creators of the language came out very confidently with this mission to get Dart natively supported in the browser based on the assumption that the language was so good and the VM would be so fast that users would clamor it. They had the best of intentions — they really did want to make a deli…

It's a shame, I was a HUGE dart for backend proponent. I made libraries and even middleware for API servers and such. I was constantly fighting to get ANY focus on the backend standard libs. In the end, I had to give up and stopped fighting. I still maintain my uuid, base32, and otp libraries, just upgraded them for 2.0, but Its a shame because Dart could have so easily competed with Node.js and it was a major replacement for it for me.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#143

Post by solidr53 »

losvedir wrote: post #71
syspec wrote: post #32

> The other is an interesting quality-of-life change for Flutter developers, which allows creating an instance of a class without the “new” keyword. The goal of this change is to make Flutter code more readable, less clunky, and easier to type Wait, not typing new accomplishes all those amazing things? Here i thought it was just three letters, which showed intent - hence easier to grok the surrounding code

You'd be surprised. In Flutter you construct new objects _all the time_ and mostly inline (think React without JSX). The `new`'s really do get tedious when you're making a tree like: Container( child: Column( children: [ Text("One"), Text("Two"), Text("Three"), ] ) ) It's not major but I don't think your quote is overselling it either. It is a quality-of-life change that does those things.

I love how Container takes 'child', but Column takes 'children'.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#144

Post by munificent »

hota_mazi wrote: post #134
sbjs wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A language by itself is almost never useful, every language needs a killer app, a concrete tangible thing that that language can do better 100x better than any alternative. Like how Ruby had Rails or JS had browsers or Python has ML. That’s not to say you can’t do other things with these, just that their competitor is good enough and has momentum and mind share. It sounds like Dart now has Flutter and I think that’s…

> A language by itself is almost never useful, every language needs a killer app, I don't understand why this myth is still around. C++ never had a killer app to start its momentum. Neither did Javascript. Nor Java really (or maybe applets, back in the days?). Languages can succeed on technical merits alone if they come out at the right time and fix real problems that programmers experience on current mainstream lang…

I think you need at least one of three things to get a new language off the ground:

1. Extreme compatibility with the current entrenched language so you can incrementally migrate. C++ from C. CoffeeScript and TypeScript from JavaScript. Kotlin from Java.

2. A killer app (well, framework). Rails for Ruby. WinForms for C#. Applets and J2EE for Java (later Android).

3. A new platform where you must use the language to target it. C for UNIX. Objective-C for iOS. JavaScript for the browser.

There are a few exceptions here and there, but the above are the typical well-trod paths to success for a language.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#145

Post by pjmlp »

dangjc wrote: post #128
pjmlp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How have you not used Xamarin? Hot reload is supported, C# has a REPL nowadays and there are workbooks, Swift storyboard style. There are Java AOT compilers for iOS, at least three that I can remember of. C++ with Qt/QML is very productive for mobile development.

re Xamarin: Only reloading your XAML or CSS is supported. With Dart, you can reload all your code, in the same way JS developers have had hot reload for ages now. I'm not sure if C# will be able to support this. This really leverages Dart's roots in being interpreted, not compiled. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/xamarin-forms/xaml/... What changes does Live Reload redeploy? Live Reload only applies changes…

Yep, and as you quote "Support for reloading C# is planned for a future release."

On the standard .NET Framework, edit-and-continue has been a thing during the last couple of years.

I rather have the maturity of .NET eco-system, than the uncertainty of the young Dart one.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#146

Post by Daegalus »

wnsire wrote: post #36

Reading the few comments here is really interesting. Every-time there is a discussion about Dart , people talk about Flutter... they very rarely talk about Dart on the Server or on the Web... A while ago I considered using Dart to build a Web API. I was shocked by the non-existent ecosystem around this language. The Redis package has been un-maintained for almost three years now, and Angular Dart is always a few vers…

I was a backend/cli developer for Dart, most of us were ignored when we asked for support in helping build out the Node.js aspect of Dart. So many left. I still maintain my few libraries but I lost of a lot of interest when they went full throttle on frontend only until it failed.

I hope Flutter restores some popularity. If it does, those libraries will start getting updated.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#147

Post by munificent »

e12e wrote: post #135

"... the new keyword is now optional...". Why optional and not deprecated?

Deprecating it is a breaking change and would make migrating code more difficult. It's like how semicolons are allowed but rarely used in Ruby, Go, etc.

The style guide says to omit "new" [1], and our formatter can remove them for you [2], so the effect is that they are gone without the pain of a forced migration.

[1]: https://www.dartlang.org/guides/language/effective-dart/usag...

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

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#148

Post by drb91 »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #131
drb91 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, type bound. You can still easily pass around data whose type is not concretely defined at the compilation step. Unless you’re arguing that the dynamic type is actually static, in which case this whole conversation seems semantically pointless.

2 hours ago I answered it already. If you're another person who wants to convince me that Rust has same thing as Dart's "dynamic" type, then please make my code example to compile (without modifications, for literally ANY type, as in Dart) and I will say I was wrong.

Dart type or rust type? They refer to different things, which is the source of the confusion, but they're both strongly typed.

In any case, you're moving the goal post from "concrete type at compile time" to "can represent any type", which is inherently going to be specific to how the language defines types. This is not an especially useful type of dynamic representation so I'm not sure why it would be desirable.

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#149

Post by c-smile »

I have a feeling that Dart is just D (or at least they are comparable syntax and feature wise).

So is the question: why Dart?

Or is its goal to be a Java-on-Android killer? So always to have some [inspectable] bytecodes as a delivery media and JIT those on a device? But JavaVM is already there for that purpose so is that sacramental question again...

Re: Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform

#150

Post by jswizzy »

Flutter is the groundbreaking thing about Dart. Other than that it's just Java 1.5 without the killer opensource ecosystem that makes Java relevant to this day. Rust, Swift, and Kotlin all blow Dart out of the water and are much better investments unless Google wants to make Dart the only language their new OS for some weird reason.
Post reply on HN