Dart News & Updates

Last month we had the 9th TC52 meeting where we discussed a number of additional language features for Dart. Below is a list of the main features discussed - most noticeably the lifting of restrictions on mixins. DEP update There is a rich supply of Dart Enhancement Proposals under consideration, and we spent some time discussing the underlying ideas and motivations for several DEPs. Language extensions and modifications under consideration Several language extensions and modifications are currently being considered in more concrete terms. Generic methods This is the most complicated DEP, in particular with respect to reification of the type arguments and other typing issues. Since the previous meeting work has been conducted on prototyping features relating to this DEP, and the impact on libraries has been explored. Among the big concerns are compatibility and implementation efforts. This might not materialize before 2016. Constant context, constant functions One DEP is ...

Starting today, with the 1.13.0-dev.1.0 release of the Dart SDK, the Dart VM has upgraded its TLS/SSL implementation to BoringSSL . The BoringSSL library is a fork of OpenSSL that’s created and maintained by Google. Dart developers now have the same implementation of SSL as Chromium and Chrome. The new implementation includes some breaking changes to the SecureSocket class and related classes. Dart programs that create secure servers will need to provide their server certificate chain and private key in a new, and easier, way. We encourage you to try the dev channel build of Dart SDK and the new configurations for BoringSSL. You can learn more about Dart and TLS/SSL , and we look forward to your feedback . --- Bill Hesse, feeling more secure

Dart 1.12.0 is now released ! It contains the new null-aware operators language feature, and enhancements to pub, Observatory, dartdoc, and much more. Null-aware operators The new null-aware operators help you reduce the amount of code required to work with references that are potentially null. This feature is a collection of syntactic sugar for traversing (potentially null) object calls, conditionally setting a variable, and evaluating two (potentially null) expressions. Click or tap the red Run button below to see them in action. ??   if null operator. `expr1 ?? expr2` evaluates to `expr1` if not `null`, otherwise `expr2`. ??=   null-aware assignment. `v ??= expr` causes `v` to be assigned `expr` only if `v` is `null`. x?.p   null-aware access. `x?.p` evaluates to `x.p` if `x` is not `null`, otherwise evaluates to `null`. x?.m()      null-aware method invocation. `x?.m()` invokes `m` only if `x` is not `null`. Learn more ...

Back in May, we announced the release of DartPad 1.0 , a clean and zero-install tool that helps you explore Dart . To create a seamless learning experience for both experienced and new developers, today we released embeddable pads! You can now add live Dart code to web pages. Embeddable pads have the full power of the standalone DartPad: Tutorials and guides can use embeddings to quickly demonstrate concepts on the fly: You can also open embedded pads in DartPad to further edit and share code. For more information, view the embedding guide . Head over to dartpad.dartlang.org and share your first pad! We hope you enjoy this new addition and provide us with feedback—remember, sharing is caring! Posted by George He, Chief Sharing Operator

dart2js now produces up to 5% smaller output in the latest dev channel release of the Dart SDK. We measured a 5% reduction on the minified and zipped dart2js output for one of the larger Dart-based apps in Google with source code size around 17MB. While we’ve seen a 5% reduction on a large app, your milage may vary and improvements are expected to increase with the size of your app. This improvement comes on top of a previous 3% reduction since the beginning of this year. The idea behind the latest improvement is quite simple: The symbols that will occur most often in the generated output should be assigned the shortest minified names. So when minifying the code, we rename according to the frequency of each symbol in such a way that a high frequency results in a short name in the output. This new frequency-based namer generally produces smaller output, which is great for deployment. It does however also result in different name allocations and thus “diffing” before/after the c...

Yesterday, on June 17, 2015, the 109th Ecma General Assembly approved the ECMA-408 3rd edition - Dart Programming Language Specification . Main additions to the 3rd edition of the spec are null-aware operators and  generalized tear-offs .  Null-aware operators are currently being implemented and tear-offs will follow. The standard has been published on the Ecma Website.

Dart is an open-source programming language, with contributors working on the language, libraries, tools, and packages. To make working with our community even easier, today we are announcing that we've fully settled into our new home on GitHub. We invite you to follow along and contribute at https://github.com/dart-lang . The Dart SDK now has its own repository , joining the numerous Dart tools and packages already in our GitHub org . We’ve moved all the SDK issues over (keeping the original issue numbers!), and dartbug.com now points to GitHub's issue tracker for the Dart SDK. Getting the SDK source is easy, and we've documented the contribution workflow . Our development tools are optimized for code reviews on Rietveld , Chromium's code review system, and they make it easy to start a review and cleanly land a patch. For very small patches, contributors can use a standard GitHub pull request. One of the easiest ways to start contributing to Dart is to wor...