(And we'd also really love to hear any critical feedback.)
The changelog [1] always has a few entries for the Dart VM with each version, but it's quite clear from using it daily that much more is happening. Some notable recent improvements have been asynchronous breakpoints that are integrated in IntelliJ's debugger and some optimizations for sending messages across isolates.
1: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
Where did you get that info? I haven't seen it in the changelog. Is message passing using structured cloning?
Dart now targets the Web (two compilers - one for development, one for "production" - both transpiling to JS), the server (Dart server VM - fast native JIT VM), Mobile via flutter (support for AOT on iOS), and Fuchsia.
[1] https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/?fromgroups=#...
"Compose modular maintainable code" or "Achieve the productivity of a cohesive framework" doesn't really say anything at all - you can replace that whole thing with a random code snippet and a big title that says "Aqueduct - now, more than ever!".
The 'cohesive framework' one made sense in my head - the ORM and the HTTP stuff work together so that errors thrown by the ORM are translated into the appropriate status codes without having to catch the exception. I can see how just reading that may make no sense.
I'll check out the webpages for both Flask and Spark and adjust accordingly. The real info for developers is at https://aqueduct.io/docs anyhow.
How have you found Dart as a server-side language? What's the performance like and the ease of development?
First impressions of Dart are positive. However, the server-side (interpreted) language landscape is dominated by Python, Ruby, PHP etc. Any thoughts on choosing Dart for server-side programming over these other common languages and what you think the advantages are? Many thanks.
Async/await is implemented really well (Google hired Erik Meijer to help them build it), their threading model is excellent, and there are built-in keywords in the language for stream handling that are seriously productive [1]. Anyone that knows Java/Swift/Kotlin/ObjC is going to be productive in Dart very, very quickly.
Performance has been great, but someone else may be better qualified to answer that question. Much of the lower level socket stuff is just C/C++. I don't want to speak on something I don't fully understand, so I included an article about the Dart VM below [2].
To me, Dart differentiated itself by being more similar to compiled, C-like languages. Obviously, Django, Laravel, Rails, etc. are much more mature. Aqueduct is tested well [3], but nothing beats years of regression tests.
1: https://www.dartlang.org/articles/language/beyond-async 2: https://www.dartlang.org/articles/dart-vm/why-not-bytecode 3: https://github.com/stablekernel/aqueduct
I am unable to read the examples on the homepage as they scroll by too fast. Could you please do both of: increase the time each example stays on screen; and disable the automatic scrolling if the user makes an effort to select a particular example either by clicking the side arrows or the selector tabs on the bottom.