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An update on Dart macros and data serialization

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Re: An update on Dart macros and data serialization

#51

Post by Decabytes »

> Runtime introspection (e.g., reflection) makes it difficult to perform the tree-shaking optimizations that allow us to generate smaller binaries.

Does anyone have any more information on How Dart actually does Tree Shaking? And what is "Tree Shakeable"? This issue is still open on Github https://github.com/Dart-lang/sdk/issues/33920.

I think this quote accurately sums things up

> In fact the only references I can find anywhere to this feature is on the Dart2JS page:

> Don’t worry about the size of your app’s included libraries. The dart2js tool performs tree shaking to omit unused classes, functions, methods, and so on. Just import the libraries you need, and let dart2js get rid of what you don’t need.

> This has led customers to wild assumptions around what is and what is not tree-shakeable, and without any clear guidance to patterns that allow or disallow tree-shaking. For example internally, many large applications chose to store configurable metadata in a hash-map:

Re: An update on Dart macros and data serialization

#52

Post by codr7 »

lolinder wrote: post #21
codemac wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in Scheme you can redefine `define` to be number 5. This is like asking "what if your coworker named all errs as `ok`" so everything was `if ok { return errors.New("Not ok!!"); }`. It's possible but no one does it. This is why `defmacro` and `gensym` in common lisp are awesome, and similarly why Go's warts don't matter. Much of programming language ugliness is an "impact x frequency" calculation, rather than one or…

"No one does it" is extremely relative. Take your closing remark about JavaScript: I don't run into JS warts very often at all, and I'm a professional web developer who works in it day in and day out. I guess my team just doesn't do dumb JS stuff? But apparently lots of other people do run into them regularly, so I believe that such things do exist. By the same token, I've heard countless reports of people struggling…

I would definitely recommend mature teams for powerful languages, and the other way around.

You wouldn't let a child handle a chainsaw.

Re: An update on Dart macros and data serialization

#54

Post by eseidel »

paulddraper wrote: post #46
eseidel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Flutter founder here.] I'm pretty sure we did look at C# (and certainly a whole bunch of other languages). I don't actually recall why we didn't use C# at the time. I remember Go binaries were waaay to big, JS (what we originally wrote Flutter in) startup time was way too slow on iOS, Swift was too deeply tied to Apple (the standard library was closed source at that time), etc. It's possible that C# was too verbose…

I am curious as well. Despite the "not invented at Google" swipe * TypeScript wasn't invented at Google either, but adopted heavily. * Angular was the first major project ever to use TS. * And interestingly enough, Anders Hejlsberg contributed heavily to both.

Typescript is great! But doesn't get you away from running in a JS interpreter or JIT, which at least on iOS is very slow. We wrote the first 3 versions of Flutter in JS but eventually had to move off due to 10s+ startup times (we wrote a ton of JS). Once we moved to an ahead-of-time compiled language we could write as much code as we wanted and the user didn't have to compile it during launch on their device. Typescript would have that problem still today, sadly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqGAC5QCYuQ is a talk where we discuss what led to modern Flutter (including 3 attempts in JS).

Angular was originally in Dart is my understanding, but eventually forked into two projects. Angular Dart (which is really only still used internally at Google, mostly for Google AdWords which makes all the money) and Angular JS which is what has seen so much popularity more generally.

Re: An update on Dart macros and data serialization

#55

Post by chad1n »

Sounds like a good thing overall, my biggest annoyance when I was writing a flutter app was the codegen for annotations (which sure it's better iteratively, but the first one was taking minutes), but if you move these seconds that happen once in a while to seconds during "hot" reload, you're just losing. Honestly, I think they should try to come with a faster codegen, maybe write it in c++ or rust and fix these problems, because macros aren't a silver bullet. They introduce complexity, a new "thing to learn" and sometimes lead to Turing complete machines.

Re: An update on Dart macros and data serialization

#56

Post by cogman10 »

eseidel wrote: post #35
zigzag312 wrote: post #17

They should have just use C# for Flutter. Without investing significant time, like they did with Dart, they would have a language with a much bigger ecosystem that is faster, already has compile time code generation and better support for data than Dart. It supports ahead-of-time compilation and hot-reload. The only feature missing in C# is compilation to JS, but with WASM is that really needed? Biggest downside of C…

[Flutter founder here.] I'm pretty sure we did look at C# (and certainly a whole bunch of other languages). I don't actually recall why we didn't use C# at the time. I remember Go binaries were waaay to big, JS (what we originally wrote Flutter in) startup time was way too slow on iOS, Swift was too deeply tied to Apple (the standard library was closed source at that time), etc. It's possible that C# was too verbose…

Assuming you were looking at the language 2016ish I could see why you'd rule out C#.

That was the same year that MS first released C# core. For cross platform support mono was really the only way to go and it was second class.

MS was just starting to get out of the mindset of putting the universe into the .Net framework and instead offering first class support for a broader 3rd party ecosystem.

How Microsoft operates today with open source software really started roughly around 2016. I could see why you'd be hesitant to trust them then.

Re: An update on Dart macros and data serialization

#57

Post by whoknowsidont »

Salgat wrote: post #48
kernal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Microsoft should have just used Java.

C# was Microsoft's attempt to learn from Java's mistakes, which they very much succeeded at doing.

That's not even remotely historic accurate. Sun vs Microsoft drove MS into creating C#.

Please don't fan boy to the point of lying.

Re: An update on Dart macros and data serialization

#58

Post by whoknowsidont »

zigzag312 wrote: post #17

They should have just use C# for Flutter. Without investing significant time, like they did with Dart, they would have a language with a much bigger ecosystem that is faster, already has compile time code generation and better support for data than Dart. It supports ahead-of-time compilation and hot-reload. The only feature missing in C# is compilation to JS, but with WASM is that really needed? Biggest downside of C…

>They should have just use C# for Flutter.

Dear lord no. We don't need more C# in the world.

>It supports ahead-of-time compilation and hot-reload.

In name only. Doesn't really well in practice. Go and just look for "C# hot reload not working" in any search engine and look at the variety of contexts it just simply does not work with no resolution.

Re: An update on Dart macros and data serialization

#59

Post by paulddraper »

eseidel wrote: post #54
paulddraper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious as well. Despite the "not invented at Google" swipe * TypeScript wasn't invented at Google either, but adopted heavily. * Angular was the first major project ever to use TS. * And interestingly enough, Anders Hejlsberg contributed heavily to both.

Typescript is great! But doesn't get you away from running in a JS interpreter or JIT, which at least on iOS is very slow. We wrote the first 3 versions of Flutter in JS but eventually had to move off due to 10s+ startup times (we wrote a ton of JS). Once we moved to an ahead-of-time compiled language we could write as much code as we wanted and the user didn't have to compile it during launch on their device. Typesc…

Sorry, I was unclear. I didn't mean to necessarily suggest TS as a candidate for Dart's goals. (Though there is STS...)

I meant to point out that you can't just assume a priori it was NIH syndrome, as Google's heavy adoption of TS is a counterexample.

Re: An update on Dart macros and data serialization

#60

Post by cogman10 »

refulgentis wrote: post #33
zachrip wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question, is this comparison really apples to apples? Microsoft wanted to compete with sun right? Does google want to compete with programming languages like this? My gut tells me this is NIH not wanting to compete.

It is apples to apples. Microsoft didn't want to compete with Sun so much as have an application development language with a garbage collector that wasn't owned by Sun. You don't make much money off programming languages inherently. This also elides an obvious riposte (so you mean they should have just used Mono? how did all that work out?) and a metric ton of differences between what C# targets and what Dart targets…

MS wanted to fracture the Java ecosystem. The Microsoft Java VM was an attempt to lockin developers to MS Java and not sun Java. They created J# and C# because of the sun lawsuit they lost.

They still wanted a Java like ecosystem but they would be sure it only ran on Windows servers.

MS spent years being hostile to open source software. It's only in about the past decade that they've turned a corner.

Here's a famous email from Bill Gates about Java and how to stop it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220630223035/https://www.teche...

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