Dart News & Updates

At the Dart Developer Summit we introduced our fast and powerful Flutter developer experience. But our ambitions don’t stop here, so we have been hard at work developing several updates that further improve the experience. Faster startup during development Hot reload means you only have to launch your app once; after that changes are simply reloaded into the running app. But even that initial launch should be really fast. Previously we used a loader application to bootstrap the device with your application sources. Thanks to recent improvements made to the reload engine inside the VM this is no longer necessary and your application will be booted immediately, and you will see the real launch experience of your app. IntelliJ improvements We have published an update to our IntelliJ plugin, version 0.1.6 that has several exciting changes : Launching the app with hot reload support (see details below) A new flutter action pane has been added on flutter.yaml files (see de...

Dart 1.21 is now available. It introduces support for generic method syntax along with a few popular convenience features. Get it now! Generic method syntax Until now, Dart's generic support was limited to classes, such as List<T> . Dart 1.21 introduces syntax allowing type arguments on methods and functions.    T first<T>(List<T> ts) {      return ts.length == 0 ? throw new ArgumentError('Empty list!') : ts[0];    } Note the return type, T . This enables call sites to preserve type information from arguments. Try to write the same function without a type argument, and you'll see that the return type must be Object – there is no other way we can make it work on all lists. For more examples, check out the Using Generic Methods article . For even more details, the informal specification is the place to go. We've had generic methods and functions for a while in strong mode . 1.21 introduces support for generic method s...

To contribute to the celebration of the recent 1.0 launch of StageXL , we had a chat with Bernhard Pichler to learn more. Here we go. --- First and foremost huge congrats on the 1.0 launch! People are already raving over it on Hacker News and Reddit . This is really a great accomplishment. I was wondering if you could start by telling us a bit about who you are? Thanks. Sure. My name is Bernhard Pichler, I'm 42 years old and I'm from Austria - you know Sound Of Music but no kangaroos. In my day job I work as a developer for a company in the gaming and betting industry. Nowadays I mostly do stuff on the backend but I used to work on the frontend in the past. That's why I still love to do computer graphics and why I work on StageXL in my spare time. How would you explain in less than 54 words, what StageXL is?  StageXL is a 2D rendering engine mainly built for casual games. Games like Farmville or Bejeweled are good examples. More people are playing this ki...