And yet, I very very rarely hear anyone talking about it? I assume it's pushed heavily internally at Google, but anecdotally it seems nigh-unused outside of Google.
Am I totally off?
Am I totally off?
But then sometime while Chrome was ignoring it, some ads engineers (who are also incredibly talented) decided that Dart would be a core language in their new ads platform. Which meant that when the Chrome team decided to kill it, Ads piped up and said "No, you can't do that, it's a key part of our infrastructure, making $75B/year and paying all of your salaries." As a result, the whole Dart team was moved over to Ads, where they continue to improve the language & tooling so that Google can continue to make money.
Ironically, this probably means that Dart is right up there behind COBOL, C, C++, and Java in terms of the amount of money it makes for its users, and well ahead of more popular languages like Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Go, Rust, etc.
Angular vs. Polymer.
GWT vs. Angular vs. Closure vs. Polymer.
YouTube vs. Google Video (the latter was still a thing up through 2011, 5 years after the YouTube acquisition).
ChromeOS vs. Android.
Google Toolbar vs. Chrome Frame.
Chrome vs. Android Browser.
GTalk vs. Messenger vs. Hangouts vs. Allo vs. Duo
Same for Angular / Polymer. It seems you added them to your list just so that it would be longer.
Doesn't leave much for Dart.
https://plus.google.com/+MontyRasmussen/posts/UWyjF5S14Uo
I'm not saying that this is general to moderators, but some people try to deny it exists or is relevant (probably because they have invested in other toolchains), and if your filter-bubble is controlled by them, you will miss out.
Assuming the moderation action was due to "not liking dart" when we've nothing except the complaining of the newly-banned to substantiate it doesn't strike me as particularly fair.
If dart was popular you'd see the flag being flown in multiple places; you dont. Its not. Even the /r/dart subreddit is dead.
It's not because of some conspiracy to bury dart news; people just don't care.
Community is important.
/r/dartlang is the main Dart subreddit.
Given that what I liked about it most was types and web components, which are pretty robust now with well established tools (Typescript and React), I wonder what's the real allure in Dart as opposed to those seemingly more popular options?
Back in 2004, Google hired Lars Bak and his team (who had previously created the HotSpot VM for Sun) to create the V8 JS engine for Chrome. Their work was a spectacular success. Overnight, JS became one of the fastest dynamic languages in existence, and this ushered in an arms-race for better JS performance across competing browsers.
However, after a few years of wringing ever more speed out of JS, Bak and co. were totally fed up with it. In particular, how its various quirks prevented a lot of the optimisations they wanted to do. Afraid that Bak would quit, and maybe go work for a competitor, Google schemed to keep him. They let him design his own new language (originally called Dash, later Dart) that would be more amenable to optimisation, and planned to ship a separate Dart VM within Chrome.
However, these plans got leaked, and caused a bit of a furore back in 2011. The feeling was that Google were attempting something of an Microsoft-style takeover of a big chunk of the web platform. When other browser vendors said they wouldn't ship a Dart VM, they plan was dead, sort of. Google still wanted to keep Bak and his team on-board, so they let them continue working, and they developed a Dart-to-JS compiler so Dart could run on the web without a separate VM.
Google's big enough and rich enough that they can afford to run plenty of these strange projects. And if Dart is popular internally, and delivering value, why kill it? It is ironic though that of all the big web platform technology plays that Google have made — GWT, Dart, Polymer — the one that went stratospheric was Angular, a random, minor open-source project without any place in the grand strategy.
Incidentally, one side effect of all this was that Chrome's V8 engine lost most of its key developers, and so its progress stalled for quite a while. Eventually Google formed a new team V8, based in Munich, to pick up the ball. That's why there's been so much more progress on stuff like ES6+ features and better JIT compilation in the past year or so.
PS: when dart came out, javascript was already blazingly fast (as a dynamic language) and largely usable. Dart is indeed better but not that better to revolutionize web programming. On the other hand, most general-purpose programming languages are very slow even nowadays. Pypy is faster than CPython, but not to the level of V8, dart, julia or luajit. A capable JIT compiled dynamic language may change how we program. Dart was the closest, but missed the target.
You mean Lisp? AOT/JIT available since the 70's.
Having seen a talk on Nim at the Bris.tech conference [1], I can't think of any void it would fill better than an alternative. My takeaway was it was a very flexible but poorly designed language with too many ways to do anything.
1. Video coming soon; keep an eye on https://www.youtube.com/user/bristechmeetup/videos
(If locals are listening in: we are planning to organize a meetup in Budapest, contact me if interested.)