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Dartium: Google’s New Dart Programming Language Comes to Chromium

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Re: Dartium: Google’s New Dart Programming Language Comes to Chromium

#41

Post by rst »

georgemcbay wrote: post #17
rst wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, oddly, one of the front-page testimonials for node.js is LinkedIn saying that use of that particular brand of server-side Javascript gave them "huge performance gains". That obviously doesn't mean that Node (or Javascript in general) will perform well in every situation, but it does show at least an existence proof that JS is capable of high performance in some very demanding environments. What I haven't see…

So your justification for Dart being unnecessary is that the Javascript interpreter built by the people who are building Dart is really fast (for a Javascript engine)? Don't you think that building V8 (the engine inside Node) may have given them some very good insight into the upper bounds of Javascript performance and insight into ways to fix them?

If v8 is fast enough for anything that I might want to do with it, further performance improvements (as opposed to other changes) are not going to be really high on my wish list. That's why the performance case doesn't work for me.

Other people might have different tradeoffs, of course. Which is fine. But nothing I've seen the Dart crew say yet explains in plain English who those people might be, and why the particular set of tradeoffs in Dart is better for them than either v8 or, say, some other language reduced to strongly typed bytecode for PNaCl.

Re: Dartium: Google’s New Dart Programming Language Comes to Chromium

#42

Post by firefoxman1 »

spankalee wrote: post #40
[deleted] wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Sorry, I don't think you understand how OOP works. In classical inheritance, each object only contains its data and a reference to its class. The class owns the methods - they are not copied to every instance. Most uses of prototypal inheritance follow a similar pattern.

I'm sorry about that. I misread an article that described the differences. I'm just going to delete that last comment...It's embarrassing.

Re: Dartium: Google’s New Dart Programming Language Comes to Chromium

#43

Post by ootachi »

georgemcbay wrote: post #17
rst wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, oddly, one of the front-page testimonials for node.js is LinkedIn saying that use of that particular brand of server-side Javascript gave them "huge performance gains". That obviously doesn't mean that Node (or Javascript in general) will perform well in every situation, but it does show at least an existence proof that JS is capable of high performance in some very demanding environments. What I haven't see…

So your justification for Dart being unnecessary is that the Javascript interpreter built by the people who are building Dart is really fast (for a Javascript engine)? Don't you think that building V8 (the engine inside Node) may have given them some very good insight into the upper bounds of Javascript performance and insight into ways to fix them?

The other browser vendors have built fast JavaScript engines as well, and they seem to think that Dart is unnecessary.

Re: Dartium: Google’s New Dart Programming Language Comes to Chromium

#44

Post by mistercow »

swannodette wrote: post #34
mistercow wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the five design goals of Dart: http://www.dartlang.org/docs/technical-overview/index.html#g... Of those five, the only one that CoffeeScript doesn't emphasize is "high performance/fast startup", which basically can't be a goal for a language without its own VM or JIT. It seems to me that focusing on adding this one emphasis to CoffeeScript would make a lot more sense than making yet another not-exactly-Java.

Read closer - those goals are modeled around the 5 perceived problems enumerated below them. Those aren't the kinds of problems that CoffeeScript purports to address at all. CoffeeScript for better or worse is mostly "Just JavaScript"

> Those aren't the kinds of problems that CoffeeScript purports to address at all.

Right. I think Dart's general goals are good, but I think they're wrong about how to go about it. I don't think most of the "problems" they enumerate are actually the obstacles that prevent their listed goals from being achieved. I think they are things that bother programmers whose thinking has been infected by too much Java.

Re: Dartium: Google’s New Dart Programming Language Comes to Chromium

#45

Post by nivertech »

ConstantineXVI wrote: post #4

I hope Google isn't going to solely rely on Chrome having a Dart VM to increase Dart performance. As it stands; no other browser is interested in the Dart VM, so your app will only benefit from the speed in Chrome while other browsers are at the mercy of the efficiency of the Dart->JS compiler. If the compiler can produce near-JS performance I wish them and Dart developers well, otherwise using Dart will only handica…

I think the better strategy for Google would be to support Dart on Android in addition to Java/Daavik.

This also will provide a leverage against Oracle.

If mobile devs started to learn Objective-C en-masse just to be able to write iOS apps, they surely will learn Dart.

Re: Dartium: Google’s New Dart Programming Language Comes to Chromium

#46

Post by mistercow »

spankalee wrote: post #37
mistercow wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the stated design goals for Dart: http://www.dartlang.org/docs/technical-overview/index.html#g... Performance is a design goal, but it is not given as the primary goal. Of course, a cynical observer might say that the real primary goal of Dart is to give Chrome an artificial performance advantage over competing browsers, since that will be, at the very least, an initial effect if Google succeeds in pro…

Why would it be an "artificial" advantage? Chrome exists because Google wanted to push the web as a platform forward and encourage other browsers to evolve. That's what happened with Javascript and SPDY (_very_ rapidly with SPDY, it seems to me). If Chrome is faster at running Dart it will only really matter if 1) Dart is also faster than Javascript and 2) Dart is better for building complex web apps. That would vali…

> Why would it be an "artificial" advantage?

If Google successfully gets people to adopt Dart, but other browsers rely on JS cross compilation while Chrome has a dedicated VM, then there will be a period during which Chrome has an artificial advantage. This is a virtual certainty.

Dart might also have real advantages, and those would be enjoyed by all once other browsers provided fast implementations. But initially, Chrome would enjoy an artificial advantage even if Dart was actually worse by design than JavaScript, so long as they could get a significant chunk of web developers to adopt it.

My point is that getting people to adopt a technology that your product pioneers confers on you a market advantage independent of the actual merits of that technology.

Re: Dartium: Google’s New Dart Programming Language Comes to Chromium

#47

Post by dchest »

Erunno wrote: post #38
bickfordb wrote: post #28

It's good to see alternative web programming languages! I hope the other browsers will add support for Dart and that other languages will follow.

The WebKit maintainers already refused adding Dart support on grounds of not being a web standard, not wanting to fragment the web any further and not wanting the extra maintenance burden for the changes required to WebKit in order to support multiple scripting languages. Same reasoning goes for Mozilla, especially because they don't see Dart solving any problems that either couldn't be solved in a future version of…

The WebKit maintainers refused to add support for adding other languages for the script tag, not Dart. Such possibility is specified in HTML5 (and previous) standards: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/scripting-1.html#scriptingLanguag...

I point this out because it's an important difference.

Re: Dartium: Google’s New Dart Programming Language Comes to Chromium

#48

Post by ConstantineXVI »

nivertech wrote: post #45
ConstantineXVI wrote: post #4

I hope Google isn't going to solely rely on Chrome having a Dart VM to increase Dart performance. As it stands; no other browser is interested in the Dart VM, so your app will only benefit from the speed in Chrome while other browsers are at the mercy of the efficiency of the Dart->JS compiler. If the compiler can produce near-JS performance I wish them and Dart developers well, otherwise using Dart will only handica…

I think the better strategy for Google would be to support Dart on Android in addition to Java/Daavik. This also will provide a leverage against Oracle. If mobile devs started to learn Objective-C en-masse just to be able to write iOS apps, they surely will learn Dart.

If Google wanted a second language on Android, they'd have it by now. Either golang or JS+V8 (possibly out-of-browser) would have been fine choices. As well, Dart's stated goal is "structured web programming", and parts of it's design are constrained by the need to run within the browser and compile down to JS. Imposing those same restrictions on Android development would be counterproductive.

Re: Dartium: Google’s New Dart Programming Language Comes to Chromium

#49

Post by ConstantineXVI »

spankalee wrote: post #29
ConstantineXVI wrote: post #4

I hope Google isn't going to solely rely on Chrome having a Dart VM to increase Dart performance. As it stands; no other browser is interested in the Dart VM, so your app will only benefit from the speed in Chrome while other browsers are at the mercy of the efficiency of the Dart->JS compiler. If the compiler can produce near-JS performance I wish them and Dart developers well, otherwise using Dart will only handica…

One of Dart's design goals is to be able to be compiled to efficient Javascript. That does limit some of the choices that the language designers can make, but it means that there should be good performance on all modern browsers. The VM presumably takes advantage of the slightly less dynamic nature of Dart to make more agressive optimizations than V8.

I'm just concerned that Google (being both the origin of Dart and a prominent developer of webapps) will spend most of their development time writing Dart apps running on their Dart VM and slowly begin to neglect (remember, doesn't necessarily have to be malicious) the performance of their JS output.

Re: Dartium: Google’s New Dart Programming Language Comes to Chromium

#50

Post by zoips »

melling wrote: post #22

How much faster can we expect Dart apps to run with the VM vs JIT'ed JavaScript? If we can get a 5x-10x boost, I think a lot more will become possible in the browser. At some point, I would hope Webkit and Firefox would adopt it. Why not?

If Google was only interested in putting a faster language into Chrome they could have just shipped with LuaJIT for Lua and been done with it. Obviously they're more interested in playing around in their own sandbox (Dart).
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