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Comment by Bahamut | Hacker News Reader

Thank god - for anyone who has contributed to Angular 2, having to write code a certain way because of dart sucks.

Dart doesn't suck. Dart is different and developing in a way that meets both language needs is a pain in many situations. If you say Dart sucks you also have to admit that TS sucks. They just suck at different things. There are no upsides without downsides. It's just about what upsides and downsides you are more comfortable to live with.

I didn't say Dart sucks - I said having to write the code a certain way when contributing due to Dart support, which is near non-existent outside Google, sucks.

In addition, it has complicated a lot of stuff for a long time due to build setups, bugs related to toolchains around Dart and Angular 2's repository, lengthier CI runtimes, and more. It was a huge net negative for those looking to contribute, even for simple changes.

> I said having to write the code a certain way when contributing due to Dart support

It sucks in both directions. If you're trying to fix things for Dart users, it's also a real hassle to have to figure out how to back-translate that into some kind of TypeScript that will then be compiled back into the Dart code you have in mind.

Having a single source of truth that you translate to JS/TS and Dart makes a lot of sense when the value you get from sharing outweighs the cost of dealing with the pipeline. My impression is that that cost/benefit hasn't worked out well for Angular. I think being split will enable both sides to move faster, even if it means manually migrating some fixes between the two languages.

I don't think OP was saying that dart sucks. He was saying it was a pain to have to write his ts code in a certain way to accomodate the Dart side of things. By splitting the repo he doesn't have to worry about that anymore, just like Dart developers won't have to worry about the ts/js side.

The post you are replying to didn't say Dart sucks.

> having to write code a certain way because of dart sucks

Oh come on, it was obviously meant as

> having to write code a certain way (because of dart) > sucks

OP didn't quite say that Dart sucks though, did he? He said that coding in TS having to also cater to Darts needs/conventions sucks (which might be true or not, no idea really).

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