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Comment by pfooti | Hacker News Reader

My initial reactions upon hearing this.

  * wait, is dart still a thing?
  * this can't be good for angulardart.

Basically they're splitting the project into two projects, claiming that both sides will benefit from lots of support. I suppose if the typescript half of angular was held back by any needs to cross-compile into dart, then the typescript half will be losing shackles.

I honestly don't see how a low-penetration language is going to benefit much here - are we going to see a resurgence of interest in dartlang just because now there's a more native-feeling angular library for it? I've been wrong in the past, I guess.

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> are we going to see a resurgence of interest in dartlang

It is hard to predict the future, but I do think this is a very positive move for Dart that will drive adoption.

Dart frameworks were always playing second fiddle to the needs of Javascript developers - resulting in compromises.

A Dart first framework (with some awesome Material widgets thrown in) will offer a compelling developer experience.

Combine that with Dart on Mobile (flutter.io), Dart on IoT (dartino.io) and Dart on the server, and you have a very nice story.

Rectify dart and go for me, please.

Why should I learn one or the other?

If the ideas and concepts behind dart are so good why isn't golang taking input from it?

If golang is so good why does dart even exist?

Dart and Go each serve different platforms.

Your question is kind of nonsensical. The two languages have little, if any, overlap in use cases.

This isn't true; they're both general purpose programming languages with strong static type systems and decent async I/O stories. You can write a web app or a server in either language, though Dart has a better ecosystem for frontend development, and Go has a better ecosystem for backend development.

Is there any "ecosystem for frontend development" for Go at all?

Dart is dynamically typed.

It's technically optionally typed, but it has a static type checker which puts it more in the "static" camp in my mind. https://www.dartlang.org/articles/language/optional-types

Well, for example, you could use Go on the server and Dart in the browser. (I quite like using Go with App Engine.)

Of course that means you can't share code between client and server, but not everyone needs that.

Both Dart and Go can be run in the browser or on the server, so you can share code between client and server regardless of which language you choose, so long as you don't mix them.

Well, maybe. I have not kept up with GopherJS; how are they doing on code size? And while you can certainly run Dart on an App Engine Managed VM, there is no free tier like with Go.

Not sure about GopherJS. I'm confused about how App Engine's pricing model relates to whether or not Dart is well-suited to server tasks?

Well, it's relevant to those of us who are using App Engine. Where else can I can I set up a service for a hobby project without a monthly charge if it's barely used?

I'm personally of the opinion that many languages is a good thing. I don't like monocultures much, so on that level, I want dart to succeed.

I agree that having a robust dart-first framework (and widget library) is a necessary condition for making dart popular. Here's hoping it is also sufficient. I feel like Dart lost its biggest edge when google moved away from the dart runtime. If everything is just compiled down to js anyway, dart can't do much more than put syntactic sugar over what's already there, instead of providing a real new language experience.

Then again, clojure, scala, and java are really different experiences. Maybe google's backing keeps the language running long enough to gain real traction.

From http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/07/a-dedicated-team-for-a...:

"If you're a TypeScript or JavaScript developer, you'll also benefit from cleaner JavaScript APIs and performance gains as we simplify the TypeScript codebase to remove the need for compilation to Dart."

Maybe this split was prompted by the imminent release of Typescript 2.0?

Many Google teams are using it so it will be maintained regardless. The team maintaining it doesn't really depend on outside enthusiasm (though it would certainly be nice).

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