Dart Team Updates and Notes

Posted by Seth Ladd


Summary

• Summer vacations are wrapping up, back to work! The Dart project ramps up for the M1 release, which delivers a more stable language and implementations.

Details

Dart language specification:

• Version 0.11 is almost ready - this is pretty much the M1 version.
• Mixin proposal to be published.

Dart libraries [core, unittest, i18n, etc]:

• Ability to make temporal assertions with the mocking library
• Work in progress on sharing the source for the dart: library implementations across VM and dart2js.

Dart VM:

• New language features implemented: “non-constant initializers for fields” (bug 3848), “static methods are compile-time constants” (bug 3406), “operator syntax” (bug 3767), “getter syntax” (bug 3608), “on-catch support” (bug 3757).
• Switched to using SSA-based optimizing compiler both on ia32 and x64.
• Using type propagation to eliminate assignability checks to improve checked mode speed.
• Added support for external and patch to enable shared core library sources.
• 20% decrease in initial heap size for new isolates.

Dart to JavaScript Compiler:

• Improved noSuchMethod handling to limit the explosion in code size that used to arise from using the feature anywhere in the code base.
• Started propagating type information through parameters to generate smaller and faster output.
• Introduced basic framework for providing type information to the compiler backend, which will be used to experiment with global concrete type inferencing.

• Added primitive support for external and patch to enable shared core library sources.

dart2dart:

• Close to be able to bundle the whole dart2js into a monolithic Dart file

Dart Editor:

• An initial implementation of a 'Create Method' quick fix. This will create a method definition to satisfy a reference to a non-existent method. You can access this functionality through the ctrl/command-1 keystroke; currently only top-level functions are supported.
• Several analysis fixes and various updates to our analysis code for M1 language support.
• We now include optional parameters in completion proposals.
• There is a new Breakpoints view to view your debugger breakpoints.
• Enhanced ‘Open Folder...’ to better support opening very large applications.
• Fixes to the Apps view and enhancements to our Welcome page.

Dart UI [dart:html, web components]:

• Dart web components work has begun on github

Dart SDK and build:

• /lib being split into /lib and /pkg well underway.

Pub:

• Read-only site for pub.dartlang.org (not live yet).
• Support for installing packages from a package hosting site (like pub.dartlang.org when it’s up).
• Windows support for Pub is coming along.
• New documentation with more coming.

Dart Server [dart:io, etc.]:

• Work in progress on HTTPS support.

Dart Dev Rel:

• Auto-publish API docs on successful build.
• Added a page on Dart books
• More episodes of Dartisans