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Jermaine
Jermaine

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What concerns do you have with the Dart language/platform?

Dart is a cross-platform solution with its own tooling covering web, server and mobile. Flutter is dependent on it.

Share your reservations, fears, general thoughts below👇

Top comments (10)

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nektro profile image
Meghan (she/her) • Edited

I'll be honest it looks like a worse JavaScript with aspects of Java thrown in. It was developed before ES 2015+ was mainstream and one of its biggest draws (Flutter) was supplanted by React and React Native.

It looked interesting when I first saw it but the landscape has changed since then.

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Jermaine

Thanks for the response Sean. Did you use it too when you first encountered Dart?

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Meghan (she/her)

I never got to the point of making anything meaningful with it, but I love analyzing languages so I read through a lot of docs and tutorials

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Jermaine

What would it take for you to make something with it? I've seen some of your work(awesome by the way) and would be great to get your experience of having ported one of them to Dart.

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Meghan (she/her)

Oh thank you! I’m glad you like it 😊
I typically try to stay as vanilla as possible with my JS since I like to stay close to the browser and recent ES improvements have made JS really simple to do difficult things but I’ll take another look and see what I can do 😄

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Meghan (she/her)

Edit: I don’t know exactly what changed but dart 2 looks really nice. If I can find a gulp/vscode plugin it looks it could be a lot of fun đŸ€ 

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Jermaine

You're in good fortune my friend because there is one đŸ€ 

Dart VS Code Extension

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Meghan (she/her)

Yes! I found that but when I tried adding Dart to my gulp process with gulp-dart I ran into an error even though I had downloaded the Dart SDK and added it to my PATH. I tried compiling some files manually and I also found that a 'hello world' to the console generated a js file with ~3k lines. I think Dart might be too closely tied to the Flutter framework so for now at least I think I'll be sticking with vanilla JS and Typescript

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GĂŒnter Zöchbauer

I'm working with Dart full time since about April 2013.
I started using it because I can't stand JavaScript.

Dart was less dynamic than JS, but they tried to appeal to JS developers and had "sloppy" type checking at first.

Dart 2 is now all about sound types and strong type checking - exactly like I like it.

It was hard at times since I started using Dart because the many focus changes.
They started many web frameworks for Dart but dropped all of them after a while until they settled for Angular2 (now Angular 5) which is great.

Flutter is now the killer app for Dart and I'm glad I stuck with Dart.

It's easy to share code between web and mobile (web compiles to JS, mobile to machine code)
and when I write the server in Dart I can even share quite some code with the server as well.

I think Dart is a fine language already and lots of improvements are planned.
The last ~2 were mostly used to migrate to sound and strong types,
and to make it easier adding new language features for all platforms and tools,
but that is mostly done.

After Dart 2 is released the Dart team will have time to work on improving other aspects of the language.

Glory times ahead.

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Jermaine

Thanks GĂŒnter for sharing and it's very admirable that you stuck with this. Flutter was a good reintroduction of Dart to the web development community.

Looking forward to seeing some of your work with some Dart tutorials. You have 5 years worth of knowledge to share with us 😄