Dart News & Updates

"Performance matters to everyone", says Dart engineer John McCutchan. His new article, " Numeric Computation ", tells you how to get "50-100% speed improvements" with just a few simple rules. John covers integers, doubles, boxing, typed lists, and more. He also covers various considerations for Dart code that is compiled to JavaScript. Boxing requires a memory allocation and a store. Unboxing requires a load. If you write code that works with numbers, and that's pretty much everyone, you should read this article . Please join us for discussion in our Dartisans community . Thanks for trying Dart!

The Dart team received a lot of great feedback from the community in response to our various Dart presentations at Google I/O . We asked Lars Bak and Kasper Lund, Dart project co-founders, to help answer your questions. Here's what they shared. Enjoy! Q01: Are there any plans for to use Dart as an alternative or replacement to Java for Android app development (native APK apps)? James Wendel, United States A01: The current focus for Dart is web applications. Your best bet is to talk to the Android team about this. Q02: In some benchmarks the DartVM is now outperforming the JVM. Do you you think it will be possible for the DartVM to outperform the JVM for most code? Are there specific areas where the JVM's design will allow it to perform better than the DartVM? Greg, Wellingtron A02: For programs like numeric computations Java will always have a performance advantage over the Dart VM. The reason is that Dart code is dynamically typed whereas Java has built-in basi...

Google I/O 2013 was a breakout event for Dart. The conference featured three well attended Dart talks, a Dart code lab, and a crowded Dart booth. Seth Ladd interviews Lars Bak and Kasper Lund about the state of Dart from the floor of Moscone Center. Dart is now running twice as fast as JavaScript on certain benchmarks. The language and the core libraries are stable, and Dart expects to reach 1.0 status in a few months. Dart sessions at I/O Google I/O 2013 featured three Dart talks (videos embedded below). Web Languages and VMs: Fast Code is Always in Fashion Lars Bak and Kasper Lund dove deep into the internals of V8 and the Dart VM , explaining why the new Dart VM is needed to take the web platform to the next level. One popular part of their talk was a demo showing Dart's support for SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) processing. SIMD allows for a big performance boost. Without SIMD, their skeletal animation example supported only about 30...

The incomporable Bob Nystrom fills us in on the language design discussions taking place amongst Dart engineers. Here are his notes from the May 6th language meeting : API maturity annotations Lars says Dan Grove wants a decision on annotations that denote maturity of source code. For most stuff, Lars thinks we should just annotate the whole library. The place where makes sense is dart:html. In that case, we can make an exception. I asked if this is a language question, or just a question for people at the level of the language team. Lars says Dan specifically said for the language. Everyone agreed this is a good idea for the Dart system.  [Gilad later clarified that they all also agree it is not a language issue.] Lars says everything except dart:html we'll put in the libraries.dart config file. We can show that in the Editor. [Dan later clarified was that his question was the meta-question to decide if this issue is a language issue or not....

At Google I/O today, Adobe announced their new Toolkit for Dart, a plugin for Flash Professional CC that allows developers to export their animations and games to Dart code and HTML5. "Adobe is delighted to announce the Toolkit for Dart, an extension that enables web designers and animators to publish their Flash content to Dart." said Tom Barclay, Sr. Product Manager at Adobe. With the Toolkit, developers, designers, and animators can create interactive, animated content inside of Flash Pro and publish to the Dart language and HTML5 APIs. Because Dart compiles to JavaScript, the content runs across modern desktop and mobile browsers without plugins. Toolkit for Dart supports many of the core animation and drawing capabilities of Flash Pro, including bitmaps, shapes, movie clips, graphic symbols, classic tweens and motion guides, simple buttons, text fields, drop-shadow and glow filters, additive blend mode, single-shape masks, visible and cacheAsBitmap display opti...

Try Dart without leaving your browser, thanks to the relaunch of try.dartlang.org . The team compiled dart2js (a Dart to JavaScript compiler) with dart2js to produce a web app that lets you write and test Dart code in your browser. Try Dart is an easy way to experiment with Dart. The in-browser playground supports HTML, runs offline, and comes pre-loaded with a few examples. Please enjoy, and let us know if you have any feedback .

tl;dr : We have some new discussion groups. Sign up for announce@dartlang.org . For a quick summary, read the Guidelines section below. --- Hello Dartisans! As our community has grown, so has discussion around Dart, so we have created four new discussion groups, and updated a few others. New Groups: announce@dartlang.org : Dart Announcements This group is for official announcement for the Dart project. This will be product releases, breaking changes, major events, press briefs, and other important messages for the entire Dart community. For now, the group will remain limited to a select group of individuals who manage specific parts of the Dart project. I recommend signing up for this group today, as it is a low volume way to stay up to date with Dart on a day-to-day level. --- Note: Replies to announcements in this group should go to dart-dev@dartlang.org to keep the announce list noise-free, but still provide a forum for discussion. For the ti...