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

Dart language

dartlang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 504 posts

Re: Dart language

#411

Post by cromwellian »

BrendanEich wrote: post #391
cromwellian wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean Dart-to-JS can't be faster than hand-code JS? That's like saying C can't be faster than hand-coded assembly. Unless you write unmaintainable code or spend efforts counting cycles and scheduling and pipeline harzards, this usually isn't the case, and is not the way most people write large application (all in asm). If you take your average hand-written Javascript and run it through closure compiler, in…

"That's like saying C can't be faster than hand-coded assembly" Don't change the subject. The topic is not productivity as you seem to imply here. Also, JS engines are not hard to track super-scalar CPUs. A compiler can target one JS VM (e.g., V8) but then you're locked in. All the current JS VMs have peculiar optimization faults, some worse than others, many completely disjoint across VMs. No one has a compiler targ…

What percentage of apps do you think bignum performance will matter? Even in cases where it might matter (cryptography), you would be better suited using GPGPU code, or adding cryptographic APIs to the browser itself rather than insisting it be done in JS. Indeed, you could always fallback to that for browsers with poor bignum performance.

GWT has supported Java's BigInteger/BigDecember, and it's never been an issue.

(For the record, since it is no secret by searching my handle, I work for Google, but I do not work on Dart. I specifically work on the GWT compiler, and do not speak for the Dart team nor represent their views, nor am I really representing anything, but my own biases here given my experience with trying to develop high performance Javascript games both in the browser and mobile)

Re: Dart language

#412

Post by enneff »

ootachi wrote: post #332
enneff wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go allows you to take the address of any value. You just can't do pointer arithmetic like you can in C. That is, you can't address uninitialized memory.

I assume you mean "any lvalue"? You can't take the address of rvalues, can you?

Go doesn't define "lvalues," in the spec, but it does define "addressability." My comment would be more accurate if I had said "Go lets you take the address of any value in memory." (stack or heap)

Re: Dart language

#413

Post by enneff »

perlgeek wrote: post #137
timclark wrote: post #17

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.

Which languages? javascript and go are both counter examples. In Go the lexer (sic) determines where a line ends, so if you write if (a == b) && (c == d) it will guess a line end after the first closing paren. WTF? Python is a totally different beast, and I wouldn't include it in the discussion, because it also uses whitespace for block grouping.

There's no guesswork involved. The carriage return implies a semicolon. The rule is very simple and obvious in use (to me, the code you posted looks wrong - and it is).

http://golang.org/doc/go_spec.html#Semicolons

Re: Dart language

#414

Post by robbrown451 »

BrendanEich wrote: post #369
leoc wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in any case I seem to recall being assured by Mozilla that we don't need no Native Client because Javascript is going to be fast enough for everything . Even pre-existing non-JS code could just be compiled to mighty JavaScript, the Assembler of The Web™ and all would be well. But now Dart is unacceptable because Dart-to-JS won't be close enough to the performance of native Dart?

Go back to the other thread and re-read the argument there (or go back to school and learn how to argue). No one said Dart-to-JS by itself was bad for anything. The leaked memo spoke of a native Dart VM in Chrome and Chrome-first Dart as primary source web app authoring by Google. The clear intent was to pressure other browsers to adopt the native VM. Google can act like Microsoft (but with less market share) if it s…

so let me get this right: you are arguing that a problem with Dart is that other browser makers won't get on board, and you happen to be CTO of one of those browser makers?

That seems a rather circular reason for dismissing it.

Re: Dart language

#415

Post by BrendanEich »

WayneDB wrote: post #336
thristian wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first got onto the Internet, nearly every page I came across had a little image at the bottom saying "Best Viewed in Netscape Navigator". Since I was using Netscape, everything worked fine and I didn't care. Some time later, I began to see images saying "Best viewed in Internet Explorer". Everything still worked fine, so I still didn't care... but as time went on, more of those images popped up, and the pages…

"So, three cheers to Explorer for defeating Netscape and improving client-side development for everybody, right" Abso-friggin-lutely! You should be thanking Microsoft and Internet Explorer for upping everyone's game. They're the ones who introduced XmlHttpRequest. You knoww, "ajax"? It's their browser and they can do what they want with it. If you don't like it, don't use it. If everyone else likes it though, tough l…

Must some historical fact or pattern of facts be "all good" or "all bad"? Grow up!

Microsoft added XHR to IE when they gave Java the boot in a spat with Sun, in order to keep Outlook Web Express in working order in IE. Was that "all good"? Clearly not for Sun or Java!

The browser wars phase I had no winners. Yes, IE's DHTML innovations such as innerHTML were a win, and Netscape should have agreed to implement and standardize them. No, the long IE6 stagnation and legacy were Not Good.

Re: Dart language

#416

Post by Peaker »

iaskwhy wrote: post #331
highwind81 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Circle my_circle = new Circle(); I have to type the word circle 3 times to define a circle. It gets boring. This gets worse if you are trying to do any kind of user input. BufferedReader my_reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in)); Had to type reader 4 times. :(

But is it something people actually type? I haven't played with Java for almost ten years now but I do C# for a living which is pretty similar and I can't remember the last time I had to type something that long, Visual Studio does it for me. I can see the point if you say it's longer to read but it's also much clearer, isn't it?

Redundancy is noise.. How is it any clearer to read?

Re: Dart language

#417

Post by BrendanEich »

cromwellian wrote: post #409
BrendanEich wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such ignorance. Willful? You seem new around here, and you are not using your real name. If only we were on Google+ :-/. The long stagnation from ES3 (1999) to ES5 (2009) had everything to do with Microsoft abusing its browser-tying OS monopoly to stagnate the web by disbanding the IE team after IE6. This was prosecuted in U.S. v. Microsoft. How old are you, to never learn or else to forget this? When I brought Mozil…

You accuse me of trollish behavior, yet resort to personal slights, asking how old I am? Irony. Did I ever question your age or intent? I am fully aware of Microsoft's behavior, but that still doesn't address the fundamental issue that language evolution within spec committees is painfully slow and the competing interests waterdown proposals. It happened to C++ and to Java too. It happens in our government as well, w…

Am I promising you a pony? No, but then you are not a three-year old. I am simply working every day to advance the open web, including JS, including on mobile devices. What are you doing, besides asserting falsehoods about the JS standard and its leading implementations?

Re: Dart language

#418

Post by BrendanEich »

robbrown451 wrote: post #414
BrendanEich wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go back to the other thread and re-read the argument there (or go back to school and learn how to argue). No one said Dart-to-JS by itself was bad for anything. The leaked memo spoke of a native Dart VM in Chrome and Chrome-first Dart as primary source web app authoring by Google. The clear intent was to pressure other browsers to adopt the native VM. Google can act like Microsoft (but with less market share) if it s…

so let me get this right: you are arguing that a problem with Dart is that other browser makers won't get on board, and you happen to be CTO of one of those browser makers? That seems a rather circular reason for dismissing it.

No browser vendor will give a free lunch to a competitor, at high opportunity cost, by locking themselves into a brand-new and 2nd scripting engine. No one. Steve Jobs' ghost will haunt anyone who tries.

It doesn't matter how "good" Dart is.

Re: Dart language

#419

Post by cromwellian »

cromwellian wrote: post #409
BrendanEich wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such ignorance. Willful? You seem new around here, and you are not using your real name. If only we were on Google+ :-/. The long stagnation from ES3 (1999) to ES5 (2009) had everything to do with Microsoft abusing its browser-tying OS monopoly to stagnate the web by disbanding the IE team after IE6. This was prosecuted in U.S. v. Microsoft. How old are you, to never learn or else to forget this? When I brought Mozil…

You accuse me of trollish behavior, yet resort to personal slights, asking how old I am? Irony. Did I ever question your age or intent? I am fully aware of Microsoft's behavior, but that still doesn't address the fundamental issue that language evolution within spec committees is painfully slow and the competing interests waterdown proposals. It happened to C++ and to Java too. It happens in our government as well, w…

This is what this conversation is starting to sound like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOrI6uqS-vk

Re: Dart language

#420

Post by robbrown451 »

BrendanEich wrote: post #418
robbrown451 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so let me get this right: you are arguing that a problem with Dart is that other browser makers won't get on board, and you happen to be CTO of one of those browser makers? That seems a rather circular reason for dismissing it.

No browser vendor will give a free lunch to a competitor, at high opportunity cost, by locking themselves into a brand-new and 2nd scripting engine. No one. Steve Jobs' ghost will haunt anyone who tries. It doesn't matter how "good" Dart is.

re: brand new: fine, wait until it isn't brand new

re: lock in: I'd think Mozilla isn't really locked in as long as there is a cross-compiler. If you decide the the code bloat isn't worth the speed improvement (for the sites that run dart code), yank the VM and no harm done

re: opportunity cost: well the code from Google can be dropped in, unless you really feel the need to rewrite your own version.

re: "free lunch to a competitor": it sounds like if there is is potential for another "browser war", it's coming from that sort of attitude. In fact, that sounds counter to the whole concept of open source.

re: "It doesn't matter how good Dart is.": well, that's a shame. I'd like to think merit counted for something.

Overall, maybe I don't know your world and the politics etc, but it just sounds like a lot of "not invented here" syndrome to me. And I say this as someone who genuinely admires your work and really likes Javascript (and am especially pleased that Dart looks enough like Javascript to be comfortable to me).

Post reply on HN