Dart News & Updates

The Dart team received a lot of great feedback from the community in response to our various Dart presentations at Google I/O . We asked Lars Bak and Kasper Lund, Dart project co-founders, to help answer your questions. Here's what they shared. Enjoy! Q01: Are there any plans for to use Dart as an alternative or replacement to Java for Android app development (native APK apps)? James Wendel, United States A01: The current focus for Dart is web applications. Your best bet is to talk to the Android team about this. Q02: In some benchmarks the DartVM is now outperforming the JVM. Do you you think it will be possible for the DartVM to outperform the JVM for most code? Are there specific areas where the JVM's design will allow it to perform better than the DartVM? Greg, Wellingtron A02: For programs like numeric computations Java will always have a performance advantage over the Dart VM. The reason is that Dart code is dynamically typed whereas Java has built-in basi...

Google I/O 2013 was a breakout event for Dart. The conference featured three well attended Dart talks, a Dart code lab, and a crowded Dart booth. Seth Ladd interviews Lars Bak and Kasper Lund about the state of Dart from the floor of Moscone Center. Dart is now running twice as fast as JavaScript on certain benchmarks. The language and the core libraries are stable, and Dart expects to reach 1.0 status in a few months. Dart sessions at I/O Google I/O 2013 featured three Dart talks (videos embedded below). Web Languages and VMs: Fast Code is Always in Fashion Lars Bak and Kasper Lund dove deep into the internals of V8 and the Dart VM , explaining why the new Dart VM is needed to take the web platform to the next level. One popular part of their talk was a demo showing Dart's support for SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) processing. SIMD allows for a big performance boost. Without SIMD, their skeletal animation example supported only about 30...

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....

At Google I/O today, Adobe announced their new Toolkit for Dart, a plugin for Flash Professional CC that allows developers to export their animations and games to Dart code and HTML5. "Adobe is delighted to announce the Toolkit for Dart, an extension that enables web designers and animators to publish their Flash content to Dart." said Tom Barclay, Sr. Product Manager at Adobe. With the Toolkit, developers, designers, and animators can create interactive, animated content inside of Flash Pro and publish to the Dart language and HTML5 APIs. Because Dart compiles to JavaScript, the content runs across modern desktop and mobile browsers without plugins. Toolkit for Dart supports many of the core animation and drawing capabilities of Flash Pro, including bitmaps, shapes, movie clips, graphic symbols, classic tweens and motion guides, simple buttons, text fields, drop-shadow and glow filters, additive blend mode, single-shape masks, visible and cacheAsBitmap display opti...

Try Dart without leaving your browser, thanks to the relaunch of try.dartlang.org . The team compiled dart2js (a Dart to JavaScript compiler) with dart2js to produce a web app that lets you write and test Dart code in your browser. Try Dart is an easy way to experiment with Dart. The in-browser playground supports HTML, runs offline, and comes pre-loaded with a few examples. Please enjoy, and let us know if you have any feedback .

tl;dr : We have some new discussion groups. Sign up for announce@dartlang.org . For a quick summary, read the Guidelines section below. --- Hello Dartisans! As our community has grown, so has discussion around Dart, so we have created four new discussion groups, and updated a few others. New Groups: announce@dartlang.org : Dart Announcements This group is for official announcement for the Dart project. This will be product releases, breaking changes, major events, press briefs, and other important messages for the entire Dart community. For now, the group will remain limited to a select group of individuals who manage specific parts of the Dart project. I recommend signing up for this group today, as it is a low volume way to stay up to date with Dart on a day-to-day level. --- Note: Replies to announcements in this group should go to dart-dev@dartlang.org to keep the announce list noise-free, but still provide a forum for discussion. For the ti...

A new Dart Editor build is available at  www.dartlang.org/editor .  This build introduces a couple of quick assist items. The first assist item lets you combine an 'if' statement with an inner 'if' statement. Place the cursor over the starting if, press cmd-1, and hit return. That converts the following code:    if (!(object is Person)) {     if (object.name.beginsWith( 'R' )) {       nextItem = object.name;     }   } to this: if (!(object is Person) && object.name.beginsWith( 'R' )) {   nextItem = object.name; } The other quick action converts  (!(item  is A )) to (item is! A)  format: Place cursor over is, press cmd-1, and hit Return to convert to to is! format Eric Clayberg  fills us in on the changes  introduced in this build: Opening type from omni box opens corresponding file. F3 works for URL in impor...

Join us at Google I/O 2013 in San Francisco's Moscone Center from May 15 through 17. This year's conference features numerous events of interest to the Dart community. You can see three Dart presentations, and take part in a Dart code lab. One of the talks, by Dart creators Lars Bak and Kasper Lund, will be streamed live. And all of the talks will be available on video. If you are at I/O, be sure to stop by at the Dart booth in the Developer Sandbox on the 3rd floor of Moscone Center. You can ask questions of Dart team members who will be available on all three days at the booth, and also at the office hours area nearby. Here are some details about the talks and the code lab: Web Languages and VMs: Fast Code is Always in Fashion Lars Bak, Kasper Lund A fundamental necessity for innovation within web apps is fast execution speed. This talk will take a deep dive into the machine rooms of both V8 and the Dart VM and explain some of the reasons why a new execut...

As usual,  Anders Sandholm  has kept track  what members of the Dart team have been doing recently. He shares his notes for April with us : Dart libraries: dart:io DNS lookup IPv6 support Upgrade sockets to secure sockets Access to the PID (both for current process and the spawned processes) dart2js Compiler Added support for new function subtyping rules. Reduced the amount of patching we do on native prototype objects to a single property. Improved indexing operations on native indexable types like typed data lists. Landed support for rethrow and treating throw as an expression. Reduced code size by sharing code in mixins between all classes that mix it in. Improved our simple type inferrer to produce better types. Dartium Greatly improved WebGL performance by using dart:typed_data for typed arrays. Following up with Blink impact Various bugfixes Pub Ship pub as a snapshot in the SDK Use backjumping...