What do you guys think about Dartlang? • Hacker News Board

Re: What do you guys think about Dartlang?

#11

Post by iends » Thu, Nov 06, 2014, 6:18 PM UTC

One thing that bothers me about Dart is that the Angular.js team decided to go with their own language AtScript, even though they were quite experienced with Dart in AngularDart.

Do they know something about the health of Dart that we don't?

Re: What do you guys think about Dartlang?

#12

Post by iends » Thu, Nov 06, 2014, 6:19 PM UTC

zoechi wrote: post #10

I'm developing with Dart full-time since about 1 1/2 years and I'm just glad that I don't have to use JS anymore. JS has still more libs ready to use but the quantity and quality of the packages available for Dart are raising fast. I enjoy that I can use the same language client- and server-side and share a lot of code. Upcoming features will make Dart even more appealing (Appengine support, DartVM in Chrome, async/a…

Is DartVM in Chrome confirmed? I keep hearing it will happen, but haven't seen anything official.

Re: What do you guys think about Dartlang?

#13

Post by wstrange » Thu, Nov 06, 2014, 9:08 PM UTC

iends wrote: post #12

zoechi wrote: post #10

I'm developing with Dart full-time since about 1 1/2 years and I'm just glad that I don't have to use JS anymore. JS has still more libs ready to use but the quantity and quality of the packages available for Dart are raising fast. I enjoy that I can use the same language client- and server-side and share a lot of code. Upcoming features will make Dart even more appealing (Appengine support, DartVM in Chrome, async/a…

Is DartVM in Chrome confirmed? I keep hearing it will happen, but haven't seen anything official.

I think they are waiting on the integration of the oilpan project in chrome.

Re: What do you guys think about Dartlang?

#14

Post by wstrange » Thu, Nov 06, 2014, 9:10 PM UTC

The fun factor in Dart is super high. It's just a joyful experience with great tools.

And no need for a "Dart: the good parts" book. It's all good :-)

Re: What do you guys think about Dartlang?

#15

Post by jmesserly » Fri, Nov 07, 2014, 12:51 AM UTC

iends wrote: post #11

One thing that bothers me about Dart is that the Angular.js team decided to go with their own language AtScript, even though they were quite experienced with Dart in AngularDart. Do they know something about the health of Dart that we don't?

They're planning to use AtScript to transpile to ES6 and Dart by extending the ES6 transpiler called Traceur (source: https://docs.google.com/a/google.com/document/d/11YUzC-1d0V1...). The basic issue for Angular is they'd like to support users of ES5, ES6, and Dart with the same code base. That's currently a bit hard to do with a Dart code base (although a lot of us want to see that get better!)

disclaimer: I've worked on the Dart team and on the Traceur compiler in the past too. So I'm definitely not unbiased on these topics :)

Re: What do you guys think about Dartlang?

#16

Post by realbluesky » Fri, Nov 07, 2014, 1:12 AM UTC

iends wrote: post #11

One thing that bothers me about Dart is that the Angular.js team decided to go with their own language AtScript, even though they were quite experienced with Dart in AngularDart. Do they know something about the health of Dart that we don't?

AtScript makes decent sense in that it's ES6 plus other things they want to land in ES7. JavaScript is here to stay, they have to support it. Dart is also here to stay. It will be the answer to structured (typed) web apps and its server-side story is great and getting better by the day.

Re: What do you guys think about Dartlang?

#17

Post by yzzxy » Fri, Nov 07, 2014, 7:17 AM UTC

woven wrote: post #7

I evaluated Node, intrigued by the idea of event-driven, non-blocking client and server side code written in one language, but I found it to be a wild ecosystem with dozens of frameworks and not enough support and guidance for them. I found Dart with its promise to bring some structure and sanity to that approach, including building a language from the ground up to do away with JS's quirks, and it has delivered. I bu…

Would you like to see it replace JS? I think many would argue something should before we train an entire generation in the idiosyncrasies of JS.

Re: What do you guys think about Dartlang?

#18

Post by d2p » Fri, Nov 07, 2014, 8:02 AM UTC

We're not using Dart commercially currently; though we are prototyping in it as a candidate for vNext of some very large applications. To me, it seems incredibly promising. Every time I have to go back and write JS in our production apps; I seriously miss the static analysis Dart does; it's so clunky to find trivial errors at runtime in a browser that the editor should've been able to show you!

However; there are some frustrating holes in it though that have made our prototyping tricky; such as:

Serialisation; not even JSON support. Alan Knight is working on a Serialisation library; but even that is frustrating to use (it doesn't support DateTimes at all well for ex), so I'm generating having to generate serialisation code from C#.

No private pub server. If you want to host Dart packages internal to your company locally; you're out of luck. Although the source for pub.dartlang.org is open; it's written to only work on AppEngine; which kinda sucks.

We're also slightly nervous that the Dart VM still isn't in Chrome. I don't know what's taking so long, but this would seriously help convince others that Google is really invested in Dart.

Re: What do you guys think about Dartlang?

#19

Post by d2p » Fri, Nov 07, 2014, 8:04 AM UTC

yzzxy wrote: post #17

woven wrote: post #7

I evaluated Node, intrigued by the idea of event-driven, non-blocking client and server side code written in one language, but I found it to be a wild ecosystem with dozens of frameworks and not enough support and guidance for them. I found Dart with its promise to bring some structure and sanity to that approach, including building a language from the ground up to do away with JS's quirks, and it has delivered. I bu…

Would you like to see it replace JS? I think many would argue something should before we train an entire generation in the idiosyncrasies of JS.

I would love to see this happen; but I'm just not convinced it will. I just don't see MS/FF ever choosing to build/maintain a Dart VM for their browsers (even though I think it would be a massive step forward for web dev).

(Google should've spec'd a generic VM together with MS+Mozilla and built Dart on top of it; but that ship has sailed!)

Re: What do you guys think about Dartlang?

#20

Post by d2p » Fri, Nov 07, 2014, 8:07 AM UTC

iends wrote: post #12

zoechi wrote: post #10

I'm developing with Dart full-time since about 1 1/2 years and I'm just glad that I don't have to use JS anymore. JS has still more libs ready to use but the quantity and quality of the packages available for Dart are raising fast. I enjoy that I can use the same language client- and server-side and share a lot of code. Upcoming features will make Dart even more appealing (Appengine support, DartVM in Chrome, async/a…

Is DartVM in Chrome confirmed? I keep hearing it will happen, but haven't seen anything official.

I recently heard someone (Gilad?) say that it's still not "a done deal", but they're confident it will be agreed. Can't come soon enough for me; will make convincing others that Dart is here to stay much easier.