Dart 1.14 continues to improve core APIs and tools

Dart 1.14 is now available. This release contains a number of additions and improvements across our core libraries and our tools.

Progress towards eliminating symbolic links

Symbolic links for package resources can cause problems, especially on Windows. Since Dart 1.12, we’ve been working to support a Package Configuration File. The goal of this work is to provide a better model for package access. Dart 1.14 contains new APIs in both dart:io and dart:isolate to provide code access to the configuration file if it’s being used. You should consider these APIs experimental as we update the test package and pub to validate the implementation.

Access package assets easily and reliably

Developers frequently need to directly access assets within packages. In the past this has lead to confusion when supporting the many ways in which a Dart program can be executed. Along with the new Package Configuration APIs added in Dart 1.14, we’ve also released a resource package. This package makes accessing assets within a package straightforward.

import 'package:resource/resource.dart' show Resource;

main() async {  
  var resource = new Resource("package:foo/foo\_data.txt");  
  var string = await resource.readAsString();  
  print(string);  
}

And more…

The SDK changelog has details about all of the updates in Dart 1.14. Get it now.