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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 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