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Aaaarghhh! It is full of semicolons. Is it really necessary in the 21st century to create a language that terminates lines with semicolons? I am sure I have seen some other languages in the past that get by just fine without them.
The "hello world" example is incredibly uninformative. What does that have to do with "structured web programming"? Where is this printed out on a web page? Does the console output there correspond to the html output? Or some other console?
It's actually runnable if you click the "play"-icon in the top-left of the code sample. The "Hello, Dart!" is written to a console emerging from underneath the code sample. https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/branches/bleedi... is a more DOM-oriented version of the same program.
A language that compiles to JavaScript really needs better browser support. Decent web apps use feature detection to provide graceful degradation for browsers from the stone age. Dart breaks this by making it impossible to run any code at all. I mean, "IE9 support coming soon!", what the hell? What about IE6? This isn't a CSS style or an animation library we're talking about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Switch from where? If this were as commonly supported (and as performant) as JavaScript, and if, as I expect, this allows DOM manipulation, I would prefer it over it, if only for the strong typing. Also, I haven't read the spec yet, but I would expect the 'VM' to run Dalvik code. If so, this will make it easier to port your web app to Android.
From the menu example: document.query("#menu").nodes.add(sliderMenu.node); So, yes, DOM manipulation is there albeit kind of ugly.
document.querySelector('#menu').appendChild(sliderMenu.node);
Aaaarghhh! It is full of semicolons. Is it really necessary in the 21st century to create a language that terminates lines with semicolons? I am sure I have seen some other languages in the past that get by just fine without them.
To be honest though, small syntactical differences like that are something that is meaningful only for novice-to-intermediate level programmers. Semicolons, braces, tabs-vs-spaces - classical examples of bikeshed bickering.
Is this effectively GWT 3.0? The project page is very unclear, so I ended up on Wikipedia instead. Wikipedia actually has a leaked memo that seems to do a really good job describing the purpose of the language. Specifically, the language is meant for three environments: server-side, compiled to JavaScript client-side, and fast native client-side once there is browser support. (The main goal is better performance on t…
Dart doesn't really share much with GWT. The basic language semantics are dynamic, not static. The types are more or assertions and documentation that generate runtime warnings, but do not produce compile time errors that refuse to let the app run at all. Dart's a lot more like CoffeeScript than Java.
Mozilla's Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript, on the Dart memo leaked a few weeks ago: A Dart to JS compiler will never be "decent" compared to having the Dart VM in the browser. Yet I guarantee you that Apple and Microsoft (and Opera and Mozilla, but the first two are enough) will never embed the Dart VM. So "Works best in Chrome" and even "Works only in Chrome" are new norms promulgated intentionally by Google. W…
The Dart to JS compiler doesn't have to be "decent" compared to having the Dart VM in the browser to be useful in a world where other browsers don't use the Dart VM, it merely has to be "decent" compared to handcrafted JavaScript performing the same task in another browser.
If direct Dart code runs faster than JavaScript on Chrome, that's a nice bonus, but if it runs as well as similar code that was originally written in JavaScript on the other browsers (when the Dart code is compiled to JS) that's good enough. Dart on the other browsers isn't competing with Dart on Chrome, it is competing with JavaScript on the other browsers and that's how it should be measured.
And if it turns out apps in Dart on Chrome really blow away apps in JavaScript on other browsers to the point where both devs and users start embracing Chrome even more for these gains then hopefully that will light a fire under everyone else to either adopt Dart or do something to fix what would then be an undeniable problem of JavaScript.
Aaaarghhh! It is full of semicolons. Is it really necessary in the 21st century to create a language that terminates lines with semicolons? I am sure I have seen some other languages in the past that get by just fine without them.
The language isn't done yet. Now is the time to let us know if you want semicolons to go away. I know some of us on the team do too, but public interest will help a lot.
The thing I was really hoping for from the dart site was an "about" section, or a "why" section, explaining about the language and their goals, instead of just jumping to code examples...
Mozilla's Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript, on the Dart memo leaked a few weeks ago: A Dart to JS compiler will never be "decent" compared to having the Dart VM in the browser. Yet I guarantee you that Apple and Microsoft (and Opera and Mozilla, but the first two are enough) will never embed the Dart VM. So "Works best in Chrome" and even "Works only in Chrome" are new norms promulgated intentionally by Google. W…
If you run Google's closure compiler on JS, for example, in some cases, it produces a very significant speedup than hand-tuned hand-written JS, so saying "never be decent" is a pretty strong claim to make.