Dart 1.5

> WPF is still chugging a long strongly

Your definition of strong sounds different to other peoples. There was entire FixWPF grass roots campaign to petition more investment into WPF, twitter account is at: https://twitter.com/fixwpf they also had a website and blog pleading for MS to keep investing in WPF and fix its issues.

When and what was the most recent feature added to WPF?

> I see no point these days writing code without an IDE

You may not, but most popular languages can be developed without and IDE, which is important for simplicity / deployment / portability. It's also much easier to develop in smaller laptops which can maximize real-estate. Obviously a language that is suitable without an IDE is also more suitable in an online IDE, which we're seeing with the new online IDEs becoming available.

> C# is totally usable from the command line, most developers just refer the IDE.

So it's only usable where it's worst than most other languages at? i.e. Scripts and Command-line apps? It's so totally usable that MS invented a new completely different language for creating command-line scripts (PowerShell).

As you likely already know, most .NET developers don't spend their time developing 1 file Console apps. Any task that has any meaningful user-share requires an IDE.

> The CLR is one of the best VMs ever

Citation needed, it's not as performant as the JVM, and its lack of cross-platform is a major limitation. The Sudoku benchmarks shows that it's slower (and more verbose) than Dart even removing time spent on pre-compilation. Dart also offers high-level productivity features like variable-sized integers, saving a lot of boilerplate from having to deal with specific fixed-size integers.

> awesome base for a dynamic language.

Really? All dynamic languages targetting both the CLR/JVM are either deprecated or second-class citizens on the CLR and are always better supported on the JVM: Jython/IronPython JRuby/IronRuby Clojure/ClojureCLR. The CLR is a wasteland of unpolished efforts with relatively no traction/community behind them.

The DLR team has actually been disbanded with the primary developer behind it (Jim Hugunin / IronPython) having left Microsoft (http://hugunin.net/microsoft_farewell.html) to now work at Google on the Dart project no less.

What he had to say about Dart (http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/11/dart-roundup-frog):

    I've spent most of my career trying to end the battles between the dynamic 
    and static worlds and instead bring them together so that each side can 
    enjoy the benefits of the other. Writing this compiler in dart is the 
    first time that I've really felt the effortless blend of these worlds that 
    I've been seeking.

    Dart is the first time that I have been able to start off writing code in 
    a very dynamic fashion and incrementally add static checks as designs become 
    solid or complexity warrants the effort.

Dynamic itself is a heavyweight solution and may many suggest may have been a mistake, C# 6.0 is actually introducing new '$' syntax to avoid dynamic and make working with dictionaries better.

WinRT was not built on the CLR. MS didn't eat it's own dogfood. Divided story between Windows Phone and Windows 8.

MS should open source the CLR. Also, the new MRT - minimal native runtime.

Up until recently due to some issues with build scripts and MSVC parameters our bots building 64-bit SDK on Windows were just silently building 32-binaries. I have fixed[1] it couple of weeks ago, but my fix did not make it into 1.5. Sadly it's not just a build script fix, but also some changes in Dart VM to accommodate for ABI differences, so we decided not to merge. Next release will have 64-bit dart binary on Windows. Bleeding edge SDKs already contain correct version of dart binary.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/detail?r=37078

> Your definition of strong sounds different to other peoples. There was entire FixWPF grass roots campaign to petition more investment into WPF, twitter account is at: https://twitter.com/fixwpf they also had a website and blog pleading for MS to keep investing in WPF and fix its issues.

WPF still works very well, it is not broken. It is still one of the best UI toolkits ever constructed with a lot of flexibility that I don't think is still appreciated enough.

> When and what was the most recent feature added to WPF?

No clue. I'm as curious as everyone else.

> You may not, but most popular languages can be developed without and IDE, which is important for simplicity / deployment / portability.

As far as I'm concerned, the IDE is a part of the language and at the very least the programming experience. People programming in emacs and VIM will eventually retire, the future is undeniable at this point. A language designed for an IDE will work better in an IDE than a language that is designed for least common dominator development environments. But then I'm biased since that is part of my research.

And also, Dart is so far very weak on the IDE side. I wonder if the Dart team has lots of compiler people and not a lot of IDE people, or if they have the same old-fashioned mindset as you in de-emphasizing the value of a good IDE experience. But I would expect it to get better, they hired Luke Church after all.

> It's so totally usable that MS invented a new completely different language written for creating command-line scripts (PowerShell).

PowerShell is an optional tool, not required. I've seen huge C# projects build from a CMD prompt (not that I want to bother with build configuration management myself).

> Citation needed, it's not as performant as the JVM

Citation needed, in my experience, C# kicks the JVM's butt in Win performance. Reified generics also reduce lots of boxing issues.

> The Sudoku benchmarks shows that it's slower (and more verbose) than Dart

Your numbers are completely whack. First, it shows mono being faster than the CLR, oh and you are using a virtual machine on top of that. Do you really think people will take that seriously? Also, do you ever try..you know..a multi-threaded shared memory solution?

> The DLR team has actually been disbanded with the primary developer behind it (Jim Hugunin / IronPython) having left Microsoft (http://hugunin.net/microsoft_farewell.html) to now work at Google on the Dart project no less.

Jim and Jon are gone, but the work they did is totally still around and works wonderfully. I use it, its fast, and it puts C# on par or beyond with any dynamic language that supports dynamic eval.

> Dynamic itself is a heavyweight solution and may many suggest may have been a mistake, C# 6.0 is actually introducing new '$' syntax to avoid dynamic and make working with dictionaries better.

I'm not talking about C#'s dynamic language feature, which I don't really care for, but dynamic expression tree compilation that came along with the rest of the DLR. As a language implementer, it is very useful.

We use a similar stack except using TypeScript with Angular but keep the Rails backend.

Essentially your Angular code should boil down to one JS file, one CSS file and be hosted in an index.html. If you're dealing with modern browsers a bit of fiddling with the cross domain policy and the withCredentials flag will allow you to host the static assets anywhere (not the same domain as the Rails box).

Otherwise the easiest thing to do is compile into the /public folder of Rails. I wouldn't host in assets as you'll likely be using gulp / grunt so the compilation phase that Rails assets hosting provides will be done for you already.