Dart News & Updates

Dart is increasingly being used as a cross platform language, and on most of these platforms ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation is a key part of the development and deployment story. The dynamic nature of Dart limits the effectiveness of ahead-of-time compilation, particularly as applications scale up in size. We therefore designed Strong Mode Dart  to allow ahead-of-time compilers to generate better code by taking full advantage of the type information that programmers write. While the initial goal of Strong Mode was to enable better ahead-of-time compilation, we've also seen strong uptake of Strong Mode from users who just like the stronger static checking because of it’s ability to make writing, reading, and refactoring Dart code more reliable. The recent talk from the Dart Developer Summit gives an overview of Strong Mode: what it is, why having a sound type system is useful, and how it benefits developers by making their IDE experience better, and their errors more ...

AngularDart  got its own dedicated team 5 months ago. Last month, we launched 2.0 final on the Dart Developer Summit. Today, we’re releasing the first minor release after that: 2.1. Since the focus of AngularDart is Productivity, Performance, Stability , there are no major breaking changes (see the changelog ) — but a lot of behind-the-scenes improvements. Your apps will get slightly smaller and faster (even relative to 2.0 which already made huge strides in size and performance since the compiled-from-TypeScript days). Many features that AngularJS had to implement for JavaScript and TypeScript are not needed in Dart (because Dart already has those features out-of-the-box). So we’re removing them from AngularDart. Renderer is deprecated in favor of plain-old dart:html . NgPlural is going away — Dart programs can use the package:intl library. New components On the Dart Developer Summit, we launched AngularDart Components  — the material design widgets Google is using ...

sonarDesign  is an Austin-based company that builds an exciting app platform, in Dart. Jerry Bowerman , the company’s CEO, previously worked at Sierra Online, EA Sports and LucasArts. I asked him some questions about the company’s vision… and tech stack. — Filip Hráček Why did you start sonarDesign? We believe the app store model is broken. It's a nice refinement of a 40 year old paradigm of installing and updating software. It introduces friction between the app creator and end user. The app store model served a purpose in the early days. I haven’t found anyone that actually enjoys the app-cycle (discovery, install, daily updates, deleting photos or apps to make space, etc.). The Sonar platform is a contrarian bet on the app store model. We believe for the majority of use cases, delivering apps instantly via open standards is the right model. The challenge for most app creators, however, is learning open standards, like HTML5, at the specification layer so you can deliver ...

Jana Moudra is one of the many developers who joined us for the Dart Summit this year. Not only was she helping organize the new, shiny Code Lab showing off the brand new AngularDart Components , she was also giving a talk on “ How to build a Dart and Firebase app in 30 mins ”. We thought it’d be great to hear more about this and we’re therefore happy to share this brief chat with Jana. --- So, Jana, this was the second time you attended the Dart Summit. We were really pleased to have you join us again this year and very thankful for all your hard work, help, and support. In the interest of people who maybe weren’t able to be at the summit this year, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your overall impression of the event? The Dart Developer Summit was a really great event and I was really happy there. I met a lot of Dart developers, had fun and saw really nice talks on topics which interest me. I filled my personal todo list with a lots of "must try"...

Videos from last month’s Dart Developer Summit are up on YouTube  and we thought we’d cherry-pick the highlights for you. The summit keynote  is a summary of all the major news and of the direction the team is taking now. It’s where we announced that Dart is the fastest growing language at Google. Teams switching to Dart report up to twice the productivity and development speed of what they had previously. Next, AngularDart 2.0  was launched in a presentation  by Ferhat Buyukkokten and Matan Lurey. They showed how they made the framework’s output 40% smaller and 15% faster in the 4 months since AngularDart got its own dedicated team . They also showed our 60 fps table using setState(), and the new testing framework called NgTestBed. Later in the day, Ted Sander launched AngularDart Components  — the material design widgets Google is using in customer-facing apps like AdWords and AdSense. Hundreds of Google engineers work with these components ever...

Developing for mobile just got a lot more fun with Flutter ’s live developer workflow. At the heart of this new workflow is the Dart VM’s latest feature ‘ hot reload ’. Hot reloading your program allows you to update the code without restarting your application. Make changes to your program and see them instantly on your Android or iOS device. Many programming languages support updating the running program but these all suffer from limitations that make using the feature difficult and error prone. The Dart VM’s hot reload is safe and fast. First, we designed the system to be safe and be reversible. If we detect issues at reload time, the VM will restore the original source code as if nothing happened. It’s fast because you can import new libraries, create new classes, and even add fields to existing classes without restarting your application. Flutter works naturally with hot reload and you can see your changes on your mobile device in less than a second. And because we reload the...

On the Dart summit last month, Joe Conway gave a great talk about Aqueduct, a server-side web framework written in Dart by stable|kernel. We asked Sarah from stable|kernel to write a blogpost as well. — Filip Hráček After spending a year building Aqueduct in a relative vacuum, the stable|kernel team went into the Dart Summit with a lot excitement! Finally, we got to share our server-side web framework with the community it was built for: web and mobile developers who want to build an entire stack in Dart. If you missed stable|kernel CEO Joe Conway  present Aqueduct at the Dart Summit, you can watch it here . Our team began exploring Dart about 18 months ago and we quickly realized the potential for supercharging our team’s productivity due to Dart’s power and speed. In October 2015 Joe wrote : “It is important to us and our clients that we use platforms that allow for a high degree of productivity, testability and maintainability. In order to identify a platform that we...

Ferhat and Matan recently announced the release of AngularDart 2.0 with some pretty dramatic performance improvements at the Dart Developer Summit in Munich. We figured we’d have a chat with them to better understand — straight from the horse’s mouth — what this means for developers looking to write a web app. What is the single most important reason for people to try out the new AngularDart 2.0 release? That would be better performance. And really — as we talked about at the Dart Summit recently — AngularDart is mainly about providing developers with three things: Productivity, Performance, and Stability . AngularDart is an amazing framework for building web apps and we have internal teams reporting doubling their productivity. With the new release just out, AngularDart output is 40% smaller and 10% faster. Finally, with major teams depending on the framework for their products, we work hard to ensure stability throughout when implementing these improvements. Indeed, y...