Dart News & Updates

Today's release of the Dart SDK and Editor is the first beta release, and contains performance and productivity improvements across the platform. This latest release helps Dart developers automate code evolution, produce smaller JavaScript code and deploy Dart web apps. The major additions and changes to the platform include: dart2js Added support for dart:typed_data Improved type inferrer by using union types and keeping track of side effects Implemented sharing of code mixed into multiple classes More coverage for handling of generic type Performance improvements 20% faster on Richards, 10% faster on DeltaBlue, 8% faster on Tracer Significant progress on mirrors support (work in progress) Dart VM DeltaBlue: 40% faster than M4 Tracer: 33% faster than M4 Full SIMD acceleration Reduced initial snapshot size improves startup time for new isolates Improved stability of debugging experience Editor A new 20% faster Analyzer...

The incomporable  Bob Nystrom  fills us in on the language design discussions taking place amongst Dart engineers. Here are his  notes from the June 10th language meeting : Here's my notes from this week's (short)  meeting : Name collisions with dart: imports [A customer recently ran into an issue where a new type appeared in dart:html whose name collided with a name they were importing from elsewhere. This broke their app.] Gilad brought up this issue. Pete's suggestion is if there's a collision between a "dart:" import and another library, the other library wins. That way, we can add stuff to "dart:" libraries without breaking people. I explained some more details here. Lars asked if there are any negative consequences from that suggestion and when it needs to be fixed. Kasper suggested we start making it a warning  [instead of an error?]  now. Ivan asked how JS handles this. Kasper said DOM names are usually ...

The Angular team recently announced a Dart port of the popular Angular.js framework. Large parts of Angular functionality — components like $compiler and $scope, basic directives like ngBind and ngRepeat — have already been ported over to Dart and can be used today.  Other c ritical Angular parts like Dependency Injection and Routes are being ported now.  Karma, the Angular test runner, already works with Dart. Angular team members Brad Green  and  Igor Minar  provide details in the video from the AngularJS meetup this week . The Dart-specific discussion begins at the 40 minute mark.

The incomporable  Bob Nystrom  fills us in on the language design discussions taking place amongst Dart engineers. Here are his  notes from the June 4th language meeting : Here's my notes. As usual all mistakes are my own: are boxed doubles identical? There is a bug where doubles with the same value may return false for  identical()  because they have been boxed to different objects. Lars said it's been discussed. For doubles,  identical()  should return true based on value. We don't want the language spec to have to mention boxing so that the VM is free to optimize how it wants. Gilad asked if NaN is identical to NaN? Lars says yes. It's identical but not equal. Gilad will fix the spec. change uninitialized field error to warning? Uninitialized final fields are currently an error in the language. Kasper suggests making it a warning. It seems in line with other stuff in language. It's easy to associate some v...

"Performance matters to everyone", says Dart engineer John McCutchan. His new article, " Numeric Computation ", tells you how to get "50-100% speed improvements" with just a few simple rules. John covers integers, doubles, boxing, typed lists, and more. He also covers various considerations for Dart code that is compiled to JavaScript. Boxing requires a memory allocation and a store. Unboxing requires a load. If you write code that works with numbers, and that's pretty much everyone, you should read this article . Please join us for discussion in our Dartisans community . Thanks for trying Dart!