Dart News & Updates

Dart 1.19 is now available. Get it now! We closely collaborate with the Flutter team on providing the best developer experience for Dart for Mobile. This includes language changes that optimize the Flutter development experience. Dart code for Flutter apps commonly have long argument lists. Before 1.19, a trailing comma was not allowed after the last argument. This made it really tedious when removing the last argument, or when reordering the arguments. With 1.19 we introduce support for an optional trailing comma after the last argument of a call and the last parameter of a function declaration. This makes code editing much easier: If you've struggled with package directory symlinks, you're in luck. You can now opt-out of creating a package directory and the associated symlinks scattered around your project directories. The flag to provide to pub get and pub upgrade is --no-packages-dir . We've posted a detailed writeup of the changes if you'd like more infor...

Long ago, back in the dawn of time, when nary a Dart file was to be found outside of the SDK repository , imports in Dart only supported file paths. As the language got older and an ecosystem began to grow around it, it quickly became clear that paths weren’t enough: Dart needed a way to import libraries that didn’t care about the location of the file doing the importing. The language team talked to the VM team and they came up with a solution. In addition to file: URIs, Dart would support a new package: scheme by looking for packages in a packages/ directory next to the entrypoint, wherever that happened to be. This worked pretty well—well enough to form the foundation for the pub package manager, written by Bob and myself. But it also had flaws. A lot of symlinks had to be generated all over every package—the test package currently contains about four hundred. Not only was this messy, many tools ended up following the symlinks and corrupting the package cache. So the team cam...

Dart 1.18 is now available. Go get it! The team has been focused on implementation details over the last six weeks. The API changes to the SDK are very light – see the CHANGELOG – but we have been working hard laying the foundation for a number of important projects. Improve the development and runtime experience for  Flutter . Improve the speed and stability of Dart Analyzer, especially as it relates to dev_compiler . Work to finalize two language tweaks Initializing formals: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/26655 Allow trailing commas: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/26644 Download the latest release. Let us know what you think!

Until now, the multiple language flavors of Angular 2 were written as TypeScript source, and then automatically compiled to both JavaScript and Dart. We're happy to announce that we’re splitting the Angular 2 codebase into two flavors – a Dart version and a TypeScript/JavaScript version – and creating a dedicated AngularDart team. This is amazing news for Dart developers because: The framework will feel more like idiomatic Dart. It will make use of Dart features that couldn't work with the TypeScript flavor. It will be faster. This is equally great news for our TypeScript and JavaScript developers, by the way. Cleaner API, performance gains, easier contributions. Read more on the Angular blog. Angular 2 for Dart is used by many teams at Google. Most famously by the AdWords team, but many other Google teams build large, mobile-friendly web apps. Some of the top requests from these teams were: make the API feel like Dart, provide a faster edit-refresh cycle, and ...

Today we simplified dartlang.org, making it reflect the current state of the project a little bit better. We have www.dartlang.org for the fundamental Dart technologies—the language itself and the core libraries. And then we have separate websites for the different targets: webdev.dartlang.org for web apps Flutter for iOS & Android native apps Dartino for IoT Dart VM for command-line apps and servers Some other changes we made: Feature the pages that people visit most often. Show the core goals of the project on the homepage. Completely rework the information architecture, from domains down to individual pages and sections. Set up events.dartlang.org for hosting event-related micro-sites. Reimplement the sites to make maintenance easier. More significant changes will come, but we needed to land these changes before going further. If you notice that something's broken or could just be better, please let us know using the relevant issue tracker: www.dar...

I want to do something a little different with my blog post this week. When I’ve written about packages in the past, I’ve mostly done a high-level overview of their APIs and how they fit into the Dart ecosystem as a whole. But path is one of the very oldest packages in the ecosystem, and any Dart user who’s written any server-side or command-line apps is probably already familiar with the API. So instead of a high-level overview, I want to do a deep dive. I want to talk about why we made the design decisions we made when writing path , and how we implemented our design effectively and efficiently. This post will be as much about how the package was constructed as it is about what the final product looks like. Initial Design It first became clear that Dart needed a solid solution for path manipulation when Bob Nystrom and I first started working on pub . Paths may seem simple on their face, but there’s a lot of hidden complexity when you need to make them work with all the edge...

Dart 1.17 is now available.  Get it now! We continued the work from 1.16 of working closely with some of our key users at Google to make sure Dart is even more productive for developers. We've additionally optimized how our core tools deal with large applications, and have seen significant improvement over the last two releases. Dartium is now much more stable. We have improved the speed of the Dart Analyzer by more than 200% on large codebases. Last, but not least, Dartium startup time on large applications at Google has improved by a factor of 4. We also made a number of smaller changes to core SDK APIs, please refer to the SDK changelog .