51–60 of 162 posts
I almost finished the Language Tour when I went to the faq and was dissapointed to see that the dart2js compiler supports only ie9+ ( https://www.dartlang.org/support/faq.html#what-browsers-supp... ). Too bad, honestly.
jQuery 2 is ie9+ too fyi
Would someone who knows HTML/CSS/RoR better of learning Dart or JS next?
Even if you use language X that compiles to javascript ,you still need to learn javascript, Or it's a bit like learning rails without understanding ruby.
Sure for special cases knowing those things can help get the very best out of your code, but for the other 99% of the time, it is not necessary.
(Edit: Not that I recommend Dart over JS necessarily, but I don't agree with your argument.)
Why doesn't Google include the native Dart VM in Chrome? I think it would boost it's usage significantly. Maybe I'm missing a bigger picture.
They need make some changes in Chrome for doing this right. They aim to make DOM nodes garbage collectible with project oilpan [1] AFAIK. Both Dart and V8 VM will benefit from this. So this will take some time. But Dart is already very useful with Dartium for development and Dart2Js for deployment. [1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...
They are working on an experimental solution to let garbage collection happen for DOM nodes that are created from Dart or V8. This basically requires a rewrite of the memory management of DOM nodes. This is still very much a work in progress and not ready for prime time.
The solution the team uses for Dartium is not the same as what they want to do for the shipping version of Chrome, so it'll be a bit before that's ready.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adobe's AVM2 (ActionScript 3 VM) took advantage of optional typing. Once upon a time this was going to be the basis of ECMAScript4 via tamarin, but that never panned out for lots of reasons, most of them political.
Funny how things would be different today. ES4 failed mainly because some people thought ES3 was good enough. Adobe,harshly critized for Flash was the one pushing for a better javascript. I will never understand why Microsoft basically killed ES4. They had their own implementation on .net ( JScript.net ) so it's not like it was going to be a huge effort. The only reason would be Microsoft pushing Silverlight at that…
People without an investment in Javascript have lost over a decade because of Javascript's monopoly on clients being maintained. If we had not been forcibly locked into Javascript all this time, then competition would have produced a better alternative or whipped the process designing Javascript into shape. Now we are stuck with this ridiculously tall, messy stack which uses an application scripting language as a compile target, still lacks basic features like a standard package system, and pushes trivial language features like iteration into third-party libraries like jQuery. So now we are constantly pushing megs of JS, using insanely complicated build systems to get anything done, and for all this trouble our code runs at a speed roughly equivalent to C in 1998.
(Now that Flash and Silverlight are dead I think it is safe for me to complain about Javascript without being an enemy of the open internet or whatever.)
I don't really care about Dart, but it's way past due that there was something serious to challenge Javascript. All the triumphalism about how Javascript is already a perfect language to use for eternity is explicitly counterproductive. Making the whole internet depend on the fortunes of one language just sucks.
This is speculation: but JetBrains work on dart IDE, android releasing ART, I'm tempted to say we're 2 years out from seeing DART running on android. It makes sense from a business sense, have the option of running dart apps on android would free the platform from its java dependance.
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Opinion: nobody should be shipping any JS to oldIE, period. Their JS engines are woeful. Even if you can get something app-like (the kind of thing you would use dart for) to work , your app won't scale w.r.t. perf so you're painting yourself into a corner.
That's your opinion and you're entitled to it but people do still have to ship things for IE6-8.
If you'd like the future to be as good as possible, you might want to build new tools without the same old constraints.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adobe's AVM2 (ActionScript 3 VM) took advantage of optional typing. Once upon a time this was going to be the basis of ECMAScript4 via tamarin, but that never panned out for lots of reasons, most of them political.
Funny how things would be different today. ES4 failed mainly because some people thought ES3 was good enough. Adobe,harshly critized for Flash was the one pushing for a better javascript. I will never understand why Microsoft basically killed ES4. They had their own implementation on .net ( JScript.net ) so it's not like it was going to be a huge effort. The only reason would be Microsoft pushing Silverlight at that…
Simplicity of the language.
I'll easily agree that ES4 would have been very interesting, but ES5 (and its spiritual successor features in ES6) gave us subtle low-level power that would have lacked otherwise.
I think Dart has the potential to become a target for other languages [1]. The already-high-level code has a performant VM and it takes advantage of optional typing (unlike any other VMs I am aware of). In order to do so though, they should at least make a spawnString (like isolate's spawnUri) or even better, have the ability to JIT dart code by string but not execute it right away. 1 - https://www.dartlang.org/artic…
Of all of the core libraries in Dart (core, html, io, async, etc.) the isolate library has had the least attention so far. Now that those other libraries are stable, I'm hoping the corelib folks will have the time to give isolates some much needed love.
I definitely want spawnString() too and we've had to do some gross workarounds in pub to deal with its absence (dumping stuff to temp files).
Just waiting for "Works best on Chrome" Silverlight and ActiveX have already shown the usefulness of proprietary enhancements. No thanks.
Well, Dart will eventually work best on Chrome because of the Dart VM. There's nothing stopping Mozilla from adding the VM to Firefox, of course. Getting an additional 2x-4x performance boost would be great.
1. Standards. The Dart VM is not part of any web standard, nor part of a spec that has interest from multiple vendors, so it should not be shipped in a standards-compliant browser. This is a matter of principle that most browsers agree on these days, see for example Google's Blink guidelines: http://www.chromium.org/blink#new-features
2. Effort. Adding a new VM into a browser is a huge amount of effort. The VM can't just be added even if it is open source (which it is) - it's very hard to integrate such a thing properly into a browser, technically speaking. Also aside from technical effort, there is also effort to start a new standards process for a new language.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Opinion: nobody should be shipping any JS to oldIE, period. Their JS engines are woeful. Even if you can get something app-like (the kind of thing you would use dart for) to work , your app won't scale w.r.t. perf so you're painting yourself into a corner.
That's your opinion and you're entitled to it but people do still have to ship things for IE6-8.