Dart News & Updates

Posted by Anders Sandholm Another round of updates from the Dart team: In terms of the language, version of the spec 0.08 was pushed out.   The dart2js compiler is now self-hosting - at least under certain “lab” conditions. A few more commits (that are underway) and we should be there. In Dartium we now have initial support for SVG documents. In the Dart Editor, we have Copy/Paste and show libraries in bold in Files view. There is also initial support for excluding files/directories from analysis. Debugger improvements. Analysis, Frog, and SDK fixes Performance on dart:html significantly improved. Work on the pub -- a package manager for Dart -- has started. First checkin has occurred and discussions happening on the Dart mailing list. SDK now includes unittest. We improved error handling in dart:io to give meaningful error messages to users when operations fail.

Posted by Dan Rubel A new Dart Editor build is available.  Highlights from build 5845 include: Copy/Paste and show libraries in bold in Files view Initial support for excluding files/directories from analysis Debugger improvements Analysis, Frog, and SDK fixes Please check out the full change log  or start with the Dart Editor tutorial . (We apologize, we  accidentally  reported that this build had local rename refactoring. This feature is still in the works, but not available in this build. Stay tuned!)

Posted by Seth Ladd The Dart team has updated the Dart language spec to version 0.08. Changes include: 5:    Static variables are lazily initialized, but need not be constants. Orthogonal notion of constant variable introduced. 7.1.2:  Added  equals  operator as part of revised  ==  treatment. 7.5.1:  Initializing formals have the same type as the field they correspond to. 7.7:  Static variable getter rules revised to deal with lazy initialization. 10:  Modified syntax to support cascaded method invocations. 10.1:  Removed support for + operator on Strings. Extended string constants to support certain cases of string interpolation. Revised constants to deal with constant variables 10.5:  Corrected definition of  HEX_DIGIT_SEQUENCE . Support implicit concatenation of adjacent single line strings. 10.13.2:  Centralized and corrected type rules for function invocation. 10.14: ...

Posted by Seth Ladd We've just posted the slides for two Dart talks from this week. Eric Clayberg, engineering manager at Google, presented an Introduction to Dart for Smalltalkers to the Smalltalk Industry Conference. Mike West, Chrome Developer Advocate, presented A tour of Dart to 33rd Degree Conference. You can find those and other Dart presentations, videos, and slides at dartlang.org . Thanks to Eric and Mike for their presentations!

Posted by Seth Ladd Learning Dart at the Sydney Google office On the night of Tuesday the 20th of March, the trusty crew of the Sydney GTUG gathered at the hallowed halls of the Sydney Googleplex to learn the ins and outs of the Dart programming language. Pizza was consumed, questions were asked, Dart Editors edited, and Dart compilers compiled. For two and a half hours, everyone was head down, tails up, giving this shiny new technology a very close inspection, and at the end of the night, everyone went home happy, having learned a new thing or two about this great new programming language! Thanks to Brett Morgan and the Syndey GTUG crew for hosting this Dart event. Want your Dart event advertised here? Drop us a line and we'll help get the word out!

The Dart team is calling for your use cases for a Dart package system. What do you need a package system to do? What problems do you have? What would you like to accomplish? The Dart team wants to know! Please don't say "build npm or bundler", instead, let us know what problems you need solving. We'll collect your feedback and look at the existing systems out there for inspiration and familiarity. I deliberately left "package system" vague in the hopes of catching a wide array of use cases. Use your imaginations. :) If you are on Google+, you can leave a comment on the original post . Or, please feel free to leave a comment here in this post. Thanks in advance, your input is important to us.

Posted by Eric Clayberg New Dart Editor build is now  available .  Highlights from build 5549 include: Show SDK libraries in new Files view Syntax highlighting improvements Refresh action in new Files view Code completion for identifiers in string interpolation Bring Dartium to the front when launched from editor Frog JS compilation fixes UI and Analysis improvements Read the full change log  or start with the Dart Editor tutorial .