Dart News & Updates

With the new milestone release today, Dart has become more stable: we have fixed over 650 bugs since our last milestone release in June. Moreover, a reduced API churn in the core libraries and continuous improvement of the developer experience (e.g. in debugging) has improved the overall stability of the platform substantially. Reflection has been improved in the Dart VM. For example, reflectively performing a new invocation on an object is now 20 times faster. The VM, in addition to ia32 and x64, has also been ported to ARM and MIPS. Debugging performance was improved for stepping in both Dartium and standalone Dart VM. In particular, we have addressed debugger usability issues, such as: Stepping into closures, callbacks and emulated functions. Stepping across asynchronous invocations. Support for top level exception handling. In the Editor, the new analysis engine is now fully spec compliant. The Editor also provides hints on unused library imports and dead code, helping deve...

Ecma will hold a workshop on  Dart  on September 20, 2013 in Boston, Massachusetts, US. We encourage both members and nonmembers to let us know they are  interested in attending . In April 2013, Dart was proposed for standardization by Ecma International . In June 2013 at the Ecma General Assembly a successful presentation on Dart was held, a draft scope of work was proposed, and the topic of standardization was discussed. The Ecma GA has decided to progress with the project, and will hold the workshop on Dart before the October Ecma CC meeting. In the workshop we'll give a short introduction to Dart, set the direction for the possible future Dart work in Ecma, and discuss potential new features in Dart. Members of the Dart project, including Dart's "Chief Specification Officer" Gilad Bracha, will be in attendance. The workshop is a good opportunity to help drive the evolution of the Dart language. Please  register your interest  before September 6.

High-fives to team GlassFrogger, who used  Dart and HTML5 to win the Breaking Glass hackathon on August 18th, 2013. They ported the classic arcade game Frogger to Google Glass and its embedded web browser. "A lot of this was discovery...we wanted to see what we could exploit without having to write a native app. How can we reuse our code? We can write this once and deploy it anywhere [with Dart and HTML5].", said Adam Singer, developer on GlassFrogger. Hop  on over to the  video  of the demo pitch and a bit of game play.  Engadget and Robert Scoble  covered the winners, and were impressed by the effort. The game , while not complete, was built entirely during the 48-hour hackathon. Luckily, the Dart code is  open source  and you can try it with or without glass (try spacebar to move forward, not sure there's a move backward yet. Did we mention it's open source?) The Dart app is compiled to JavaScript, so that it can run across Glass and...

Dart libraries for both Google APIs and Protobufs are available for download. You can use Dart to access APIs from services such as Google+, YouTube, Drive, and more. You can also use Dart to interact with Protocol Buffers, Google's structured data encoding format. The libraries are open source and available today. The Dart client libraries for Google APIs cover a wide range of Google APIs . Each client library is bundled as a pub package and uploaded to pub.dartlang.org , Dart's package hosting service. For example, check out the Dart library for the YouTube API on pub . These libraries are maintained by a dedicated group of Dart community developers. Bonus: learn how to generate Dart client libraries for your own Cloud Endpoint service  in this post from the Dartwatch blog. Protocol Buffers , or protobufs, are a way to encode and decode structured data for interop between various systems. Both the protobuf runtime and code generator are available for Dart, and are o...

The incomporable  Bob Nystrom  fills us in on the language design discussions taking place amongst Dart engineers. Here are his  notes from the July 8th language meeting : Here's my notes! JS interop and proxies Lars tried to make a little app using JS interop. He gets warnings from dart2js because JS interop returns a proxy. The only way to get rid of the warnings is to edit the interop package itself to make it return the dynamic type. Gilad says we don't currently have a solution for general purpose proxies, though we've discussed a couple. The biggest problem is checked mode. If it was just static warnings, we could do an annotation or something to turn off the warning. For general purpose proxies, "implements dynamic" may be the best thing: it is a black hole that implements anything. We will have to educate people: most of the time you want to implement some specific type and not turn them all off like this. One thing...

Dart engineer John Messerly announces the launch of polymer.dart, a port of the  Polymer stack . The Web UI package will be maintained for some time, but will eventually be replaced by polymer.dart. Here is John's  original post introducing polymer.dart : Hello Dartisans, Since we started Web UI, we've had a goal to bring the latest web standards like Web Components and Model-Driven Views to Dart developers. There have been some great developments since we started: Web Components has progressed into a set of detailed specs ( Custom Elements , Shadow DOM , HTML Templates , HTML Imports ) with interest and implementation by multiple browser vendors. Model-Driven Views has new APIs ( Node.bind , TemplateElement.model ) that allow custom elements to participate in the binding system, as well as the ability to plug in custom syntax, such as the fancy_syntax package. dart:mirrors is now implemented in dart2js! Last but not least: the development of the Pol...

Today's release of the Dart SDK and Editor is the first beta release, and contains performance and productivity improvements across the platform. This latest release helps Dart developers automate code evolution, produce smaller JavaScript code and deploy Dart web apps. The major additions and changes to the platform include: dart2js Added support for dart:typed_data Improved type inferrer by using union types and keeping track of side effects Implemented sharing of code mixed into multiple classes More coverage for handling of generic type Performance improvements 20% faster on Richards, 10% faster on DeltaBlue, 8% faster on Tracer Significant progress on mirrors support (work in progress) Dart VM DeltaBlue: 40% faster than M4 Tracer: 33% faster than M4 Full SIMD acceleration Reduced initial snapshot size improves startup time for new isolates Improved stability of debugging experience Editor A new 20% faster Analyzer...