Strong Dart presence at Google I/O 2013

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 monsters (first image, below). With SIMD, that number increased to about 120 (second image).

Dart: HTML of the Future, Today!

Siggi Cherem and Emily Fortuna explained how Dart libraries have simplified the web building experience, and showed how cross-browser polyfills have made web components available for use today.

What's New in Dart: Your First-class Upgrade to Web Development

Justin Fagnani and Seth Ladd provided a whirlwind tour of the Dart platform and updated conference attendees on Dart developments since last I/O.

Dart code lab

The Dart code lab provided a hands-on experience to participants, who built a mobile-friendly web app using Dart and the Web UI framework.

Overflow crowd at the Dart code lab. The number of participants at the code lab increased by over 60% from I/O 2012

You can try the Dart codelab and build a modern app using the Web UI framework.

Dart booth at the Developer Sandbox

The Dart booth at I/O was a busy, bustling place. Conference attendees got to watch cool Dart demos, interact with Dart engineers, and pick up some nice Dart swag!

Shailen Tuli shows the results of benchmarking code in the Dart VM, dart2js, and hand-written JavaScript. The Dart VM won handily, with the JavaScript compiled by dart2js neck and neck with handwritten JavaScript.  

Adobe shows off the Toolkit for Dart

Adobe released the Toolkit for Dart for Adobe Flash Professional at I/O. The toolkit lets designers and animators create assets for HTML5 projects using Dart libraries and supports most of the core animation and illustration capabilities of Flash Professional.

Playing an HTML5 game built with Flash Pro, exported to Dart with the push of a button! 

Dart at the JetBrains booth

JetBrains featured their Dart plugin for the IntelliJ/WebStorm IDE.

An attendee gets a tour of the features available to Dart developers.

I/O news coverage about Dart

Stephen Shankland at CNET prominently covered the talk by Lars Bak and Kasper Lund on VM performance. Here's an excerpt:

John Pavley at the Huffington Post covered Dart in his round up of Google I/O news:

To get an even better feel for Dart at Google I/O 2013, look for #io13 #dartlang on Google+.