Dart Is Not the Language You Think It Is

You said "product", but you should say "project".

If you want to assess the openness of the development process, look at the process itself:

https://code.google.com/p/dart/wiki/Contributing https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/?fromgroups#!...

If code reviews are happening in the open and there's a process to bring new contributors on board, that's a great start. This early in the game, you can't expect random members of the open source community to start contributing more than a dedicated team at Google.

> It would be nice if Google maintained mirrors on Github and accepted pull requests and such, but I don't see that ever happening.

Oh? http://github.com/google https://github.com/dart-lang

Also, FWIW on the Go project we have more than 300 non-Google contributors and a solid core of dedicated committers. https://code.google.com/p/go/source/list

You don't need to write Dart in the Dart Editor if you don't want the IDE experience. I happily write Dart in Sublime, and Dart has command-line tools that I can use to validate the code that I write.

But web developers, who are the primary producers of JavaScript, will happily stick with Node.js, CoffeeScript, or plain JavaScript.

If web developers are happy with the tools they have, then that's just fine. The Dart team isn't trying to replace JavaScript, but instead provide another option for web development. What I think the Dart team is finding is that there are a lot of people that are having trouble with putting together all the pieces just to build a web app. This is especially true if you are new to the web platform, and you're familiar with the development from other places. Dart provides a very consistent platform that you can build web applications with, and you don't need to worry about jumping through all the hoops that normal web development requires.

By way of contrast, consider Go. Go is (in my opinion) an extremely successful successor to C, in terms of its design. It fixes a handful of problems with C (strings, and I would argue pointer arithmetic), and modernizes and streamlines it. The interface system is fantastic. In terms of its design, I have nothing but good things to say about Go.

In a way, this is how I see Dart too (though Dart is a much newer platform, not yet out of beta). Dart aims to fix a handful of problems with JavaScript (like better scoping semantics, a built-in module system, better toolability and static analysis tools, etc.), and then also takes the existing browser APIs and modernizes and streamlines them (for example, all of the core browser APIs use a consistent Future-based API for asynchronous values, which cleans up a lot of messy code that you'd ordinarily see in JavaScript web application code).

Is it any surprise that Dart has failed to take off?

It's not at 1.0 yet. I still think there is plenty of room for improvement, and plenty of time for adoption.

All of this is courtesy of the Closure Compiler, which uses optional static typing.

The DartVM uses a method JIT which compiles the source code directly to machine code. An interpreter has a main loop which runs instructions one at a time.

Wikipedia is a good place to start if you'd like to understand the difference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreter_(computing)

AS3, C#, Java, and JavaScript developers. That's why they went with C-like syntax. It's familiar to most people.

>But web developers, who are the primary producers of JavaScript, will happily stick with Node.js, CoffeeScript, or plain JavaScript.

I'm writing JavaScript for a few years now. I'm really tired of it. It scales very poorly and there is zero tooling. For example, JSLint is mostly about formatting and conventions, because it got very little information to work with.

Also, if you want to take care of dependencies in JavaScript, you'll need boilerplate code (several flavors exist). If you want to document your code, you'll need lengthy doc comments (several flavors exist).

Finally, with JavaScript you're always discouraged to write extensive libraries, because everything you don't use is dead weight.

With Dart, you don't have any of those problems. It scales, there is proper tooling, you can use `import` and put stuff into packages, basic documentation is already done by adding some type annotations, and unused code is also removed.

Additionally, it's a lot easier to learn than JavaScript, because the language is less quirky.

>Dart does not seem to improve on JavaScript in a compelling way. It adds optional static typing, and as far as I can tell, nothing else.

Classes/inheritance, mixins, implicit getters/setters, implicit interfaces, import, lambda expressions, proper lexical scoping, a lexically scoped `this`, operator overloading, actor-like concurrency (isolates), SIMD, faster startup, better performance, const/final, factory constructors, optional positioned/named arguments... and good tooling.

Seen that "WAT" talk? None of that.

Dart is drastically better than JavaScript.