Dart News & Updates

With the 1.2 release, the Dart team continues its commitment to regular, compatible updates to our core runtime and tools. This release includes improved debugging, faster networking, and Angular support in the Editor. Debugging Dart applications is now easier. Breakpoints can now be set at local variable assignments. A number of bugs have also been addressed, including stepping through recursive functions and eliminating side effects of using the debugger. The Dart core libraries continue to improve with a focus on performance. WebSocket throughput has increased by a factor of 15 since version 1.0. The speed of our core async primitives, Future and Stream, also improved by over 10%. Angular support in the Editor has been greatly improved in this release. Search, navigation, and refactoring now understand Angular elements. A number of Angular-specific warnings have also been added. Please see the Release Notes for a description of all changes. Dart 1.2 includes bug fixes,...

Back in December , Ecma created a new technical committee named TC52 to publish a standard specification of the Dart language. The inaugural TC52 meeting takes place on March 12, 2014 in Mountain View, California. In addition to ratifying the current spec , the committee plans to address proposals for Enums and Deferred Loading. If time permits, we’ll initiate work on the broader set of features to be added for Dart 2.0. TC52 would love to see contributions to the Dart language specification from many players in the industry. Please come and join the committee , it's not too late to get involved. For language requests in general, the issue tracker - dartbug.com - is a great place to start the discussion. The TC52 committee will pull from the issue tracker. This official start of TC52 is an important step towards a future where Dart runs natively in web browsers. While Dart apps can already be fast when compiled to JavaScript, users can feel a true performance boost ...

Better performance, more features, and improved tools mark the 1.1 release of Dart. Just two months after the 1.0 release , this new release delivers a set of compatible updates that makes applications easier to develop and faster for end users. Dart’s Javascript output continues to shine. Performance on the Richards benchmark is 25% better than the first release, making runtime comparable to the original JavaScript. Performance of the newest benchmark, FluidMotion, has doubled since November. Dart2js now generates Javascript that performs as well as, if not better than, the idiomatic Javascript equivalent. While there’s a lot of focus on Dart for browser applications, there is also growing interest in Dart for server solutions. This release provides a number of enhancements for server-side Dart, including support for large files, file copying, process signal handlers, and terminal information. New in this release is support for UDP, which, for example, allows developers to write more...

The Dart team published new docs and samples showing how to write command-line and server-side apps with Dart. The Dart VM's dart:io library provides access to files, directories, sockets, web sockets, SSL, TCP, UDP, HTTP, and more. Community packages on pub.dartlang.org provide higher-level frameworks and libraries. The Command-Line Apps for Dart Programmer's Guide starts to collect resources for the new server-side and command-line Dart app developers. You'll find links to samples, API docs, community projects, tutorials, and more. The new Command-Line Apps in Dart tutorial teaches you how to build command-line apps. Learn how to use stdin/stdout, command-line arguments, files and directories, and more. For an in-depth look at how a Dart-based HTTP and Web sockets server is written, check out Walkthrough: Dartiverse Search . This chapter from Dart Up & Running shows how Dart is used for both the client and the server. Bonus: learn how you can connect to G...

This week Ecma created a new technical committee named TC52 to publish a standard specification of the Dart language. We’re excited about this milestone in the evolution of Dart and the web. Dart is ready for standardization. As of last month’s 1.0 SDK release , Dart is now officially stable and mature enough for production use. We’ll be collaborating with the broader web community via TC52 to responsibly evolve the language going forward. The new standardization process is an important step towards a future where Dart runs natively in web browsers. Dart apps can be fast when compiled to JavaScript, but an embedded Dart VM enables even better performance . We're thrilled to have a dedicated technical committee working on Dart. We also feel confident that Ecma—the home of standards such as JavaScript, Eiffel, and C#—is the right place to help guide the evolution of the Dart language. If you’d like to get involved, please join the committee .

Learn how dart2js generates efficient JavaScript code with the video and slides from " Dart for the Modern Web Developer " talk from Chrome Dev Summit . This presentation, from Dart engineers Kasper Lund and Seth Ladd, takes a look into dart2js, a Dart to JavaScript compiler, and showed how it generates efficient JavaScript code. Performance charts show dart2js generates JavaScript code that is sometimes faster than hand-written JavaScript code. The compiler is able to analyze the entire Dart program for both local and global optimizations. The presentation shows some of the techniques, with plenty of code examples. Check out all the great content from Chrome Dev Summit , including content on mobile web development, performance, DevTools, and more. Enjoy!

The Spark project is a new development environment built with Dart and Polymer for the Chrome Apps platform. Spark is an open-source project hosted on Github. François Beaufort reports that the project contains GUI widgets powered by Polymer, the new library for modern web apps build on Web Components. Spark's primary focus is building web apps written in Dart and Chrome App based applications. It is an early example of how to combine Dart, Polymer, Dart-JavaScript interop, and Chrome Apps to build a modern app using web technologies.