Dart 1.4 Brings Deep Visibility to Run Applications

It’s much easier to improve something if you can measure it. With Dart SDK 1.4, we are announcing Observatory: a comprehensive set of tools for understanding, measuring, and improving your Dart code.

As the documentation explains:

Observatory allows you to peek inside a running Dart virtual machine (VM) on demand and provides live, immediate reporting of data. You can use it to browse most aspects of an application.

The Observatory provides information on garbage collection, the instance count for all in-memory objects by their type, line-by-line code coverage, and even evaluation of arbitrary expressions. It will continue to evolve and improve in future releases. Take a look at the documentation and let us know if you have issues or suggestions.

Dart 1.4 also includes a number of other fixes, additions and improvements, including:

• The dartanalyzer command line tool is now 100% Dart and runs without Java. Using dartanalyzer directly or via other tools requires only the Dart VM. 
• File I/O is much faster, especially when accessing large files. 
• We’ve added experimental support – Linux-only at the moment – for sharing network sockets across isolates. 

For a the complete summary of changes, read the release notes.

You can download Dart 1.4 from the Download Dart page. If you are running the Dart Editor, you can update by checking "About Dart Editor". Check out the Dart support page for information on getting help, filing issues, contributing to the project.