Dart News & Updates

Flutter test support! We now support running and debugging ‘flutter test’ tests! Right click on your Flutter tests in the test/ directory, and choose the ‘Run’ or ‘Debug’ option: The results are displayed in the standard IntelliJ test runner. The support for this just recently landed in Flutter’s alpha channel, so you don’t see support for it in IntelliJ, you may want to run ‘flutter upgrade’. Happy testing! Improved project creation When creating a new Flutter project, you now have the option of installing the Flutter SDK from the new project wizard. This will help new users get started – they can create their first Flutter project without having to make a detour to the command line. In addition, we’ve improved the error reporting on project creation failures. Reload feedback improvements Based on user feedback, we’ve made some improvements to the UI for hot reload. When clicking the hot reload button (or using the reload key binding), we disable the hot reload ...

We are constantly asking ourselves: How do we make developers even more productive when writing Dart apps? We believe that a critical part of the answer to this question is to make strong mode – a sound static type system for Dart – the standard for all Dart developers. Teams that use Dart to build apps like Soundtrap , AdWords , AdSense , and Greentea say they really enjoy using strong mode features, such as early error detection. In fact, teams that have switched completely to strong mode cite not only early error detection but also better code readability and maintainability as major benefits. We hear this both from small teams and – even more so – from large teams with hundreds of developers writing and maintaining millions of lines of Dart code. As Björn Sperber from Soundtrap says, Strong mode and the smooth integration with IntelliJ is a joy to use and a huge improvement. If you’ve tried out Flutter , you’ve already used strong mode checks from the Dart analyzer. G...

Long long ago in the dawning days of Dart, when Future s were new and Stream s unknown, Bob saw the need for a package manager to bring the people together. Together he and I spun formless bits into code and wove that code into pub , which even today carries code into the eager hands of Dartisans. In those olden days, we had no modern marvels such as the twins async and await , and our tests grew heavy and graceless under the weight of their chain() s 1 . So it was that I came up with an idea for a new way of writing tests. Instead of gluing the steps together with the cumbersome Future API, each step would register an asynchronous callback in a queue. Once all the steps were queued up, the library would run them in order. All the API boilerplate would be hidden away from the user, and the tests would look nice and clean . After honing this technique on pub’s tests, I brought it out into its own package, which I called scheduled_test . If this whole idea of queuing up tasks and ...

Dart 1.24 is now available. It includes the Dart Development Compiler and supports a new generic function type syntax. Get it now ! Figure 1: DDC debugging in Chrome. Some notable changes in this release: pub serve now has support for the Dart Development Compiler. Unlike dart2js, this new compiler is modular, which allows pub to do incremental re-builds for pub serve. In practice what that means is you can edit your Dart files, refresh in Chrome (or other supported browsers), and see your edits almost immediately. This is because pub is only recompiling your package, not all packages that you depend on. There is one caveat with the new compiler, which is that your package and your dependencies must all be strong mode  clean. You can also use the new compiler to run your tests in Chrome much more quickly than you can with dart2js. Read more  in the changelog. You can now publish packages that depend on the Flutter SDK to pub. Moreover, pub.dartlang.org  has st...