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Notes from May 6th Dart Language Design Meeting

The incomporable Bob Nystrom fills us in on the language design discussions taking place amongst Dart engineers. Here are his notes from the May 6th language meeting:

API maturity annotations

Lars says Dan Grove wants a decision on annotations that denote maturity of source code. For most stuff, Lars thinks we should just annotate the whole library. The place where makes sense is dart:html. In that case, we can make an exception.

I asked if this is a language question, or just a question for people at the level of the language team.

Lars says Dan specifically said for the language.

Everyone agreed this is a good idea for the Dart system. [Gilad later clarified that they all also agree it is not a language issue.]

Lars says everything except dart:html we'll put in the libraries.dart config file. We can show that in the Editor.

[Dan later clarified was that his question was the meta-question to decide if this issue is a language issue or not.]

? operator

Gilad: Can we get rid of it?
Lars: Yes.
Gilad: OK, done.

map literals

Lars asks if everyone likes the new proposal [that Gilad sent to the language team]. Everyone does.

[This is now in the latest published spec. Basically, you can have non-string keys in map literals. Woo!]

exports

Lars says Florian has some issues about exports. Asked if Gilad is talking to him about it.

[This is the same issue about exports that came up on the mailing list recently.]

library names

Gilad says Kasper's proposal looks fine. Given other decisions we've made, it makes things more consistent.

Lars is reluctantly accepting it.

This means it will be a static warning to import multiple libraries with the same name. This is a breaking change so we should let people know it's coming.


As always, view the changelog for the full list of changes, and to get started with the Editor see our tutorial.