Dart News & Updates

The Dart 2.1 release is now available. This update to Dart 2 offers smaller code size, faster type checks, better usability for type errors, and new language features to improve productivity when building user experiences. See our  Medium post  for the full announcement.

The stable release of Dart 2 is now available, including a rewrite of the Dart web platform that offers a unique combination of productivity, performance, and scalability. See our  Medium post  for the full announcement. hnpwa.dartlang.org

IntelliJ EAP support This month’s release now supports the public preview release of Intellij 2017.3. With this release, you’ll get a new version of the Dart plugin. That release includes features to help you better navigate and understand large build() methods, including things like showing synthetic text ‘closing labels’ at the end of nested constructors. Android Studio support improvements We’ve continued to work on our Android Studio integration (first available in the last month’s release). The fixes and improvements here include: fixes to the language selector in the project wizard fixes to the label on the project location directory picker showing when a valid path is entered in the SDK field of the project wizard displaying a warning when installing the plugin into canary builds of Android Studio 3.1 minor UI tweaks, like using consistent punctuation Fit and Finish We’ve also polished the plugin generally, and closed out many issues in: the hot re...

Android Studio support You can now install the Flutter plugin into Android Studio, and create, edit, and run your Flutter apps there. The plugin requires at least Android Studio 3.0 (currently at Android Studio 3.0 Preview beta 7). As this is the first Flutter plugin release to support Android Studio it should be considered beta; your feedback will help us improve the integration. Improved support for developing and consuming Flutter plugins For this release we worked on improving the support for developing and consuming Flutter plugins. In addition to minor fixes and workflow improvements, we show referenced Flutter plugins in the ‘External Libraries’ part of the project view. From here, it’s easy to dig into the native iOS and Android implementations of a plugin, if desired. Reload on save is now the default behavior The ‘hot reload on save’ feature is now enabled by default. When running an app, hitting save or pressing the save keyboard shortcut will trigger a h...

Hot reload on save By request, we now support doing a hot reload on file save. On an explicit save (cmd-s / ctrl-s or File > Save All), if there’s an app currently running we will try to reload changes into that app. This integrates well with how IntelliJ’s save action works — the default behavior of the action maps to a save-all command. If there are analysis errors on save, instead of reloading we will highlight errors in the analysis view. This behavior is off by default and can be turned on in Settings > Languages & Frameworks > Flutter. Feedback on this feature is much appreciated and will help us make additional improvements to the workflow. In particular, should we enable this feature by default? Improved project wizard We’ve updated the new project wizard! You can now choose which type of Flutter project to create: an app, a plugin project – to expose native services, or a package – to create a reusable Dart library. In add...

New testing support We’ve added the ability to run individual Flutter tests via actions in the editor’s gutter: And now support running Flutter’s widget tests; see https://flutter.io/testing/# widget-testing . Project structure We re-worked how we define Flutter project and module types in IntelliJ. This addresses a few outstanding issues and will let us more easily go into more IntelliJ based products in the future. The next time you open an existing project with the new version of the plugin, you’ll see a one-time ‘module type updated’ message: Launching improvements This release sports several improvements to app launching: Launch your app in profile and release modes (available via the ‘Run’ menu) Start Android emulators from the device dropdown; this requires the Android AVDs to have been already created in something like Android Studio Tweaks to when the run and reload buttons are enabled For more detailed info on the version 16.0 release, s...

I spend a lot of time reviewing Dart code. At Google, we use the Dart style guide , but we humans are poor at consistently following rules. I end up writing a lot of review comments like "put a newline here" and "remove this space". Although we have an automated formatter, dartfmt, to address this problem, I wasn’t happy with its output. Over the past few months, I spent a bunch of time adding a sophisticated rule engine to the formatter, helping it choose how best to format a chunk of code. There are still improvements to make, but I believe the formatter is now good enough to be run on all of the world's Dart code. We've been using this version of the formatter internally for a while, and people really like it. Everyone loves that it ends style debates and makes code reviews easier. Today, I'm happy to announce that the new formatter has landed in the dev channel SDK . Using it is as simple as:     $ dartfmt -w <file or directory> I'd...