My sore-point is the lack of community and enthusiasm for it. The available resources and libraries are limited.
It was extremely poorly handled by the Angular Dart team and I learned the hard way that the “source code open to public” != “open source, contributions welcome”.
I really wanted to use Dart over the JS ecosystem (it’s similar to TypeScript syntactically but with a package manager that’s not npm and none of the JS implementation baggage!) but the project is very clearly catering to internal customers at google with 0 care for any sort of community.
I should emphasize that all my contributions were fixes and not some sort of feature requests - the latter would be straight up impossible to discuss I am sure.
Good luck to both the Dart VM and Flutter team - solid engineering from what I can see, just a pity that community management was shit and put me off unless I get paid to work with them.
As a Googler said earlier, they've built the fundamentals quasi-privately already, do it seems they can only win by making it a community project.
Is it any less community driven than Swift though?
I do not have any experiences with how the Swift project is run, hoping someone else sees this and comments!
There's also a surprisingly large number of pure Dart packages. See pub.dartlang.org.
Look at this from different perspective, you have a chance to start one of the future most popular library in Dart.
Many people choose Python because of the libraries available.
Many developers just want to ride the wave, not innovate.
However, it is easy to expose C methods (not entire opencv interface) to your app via PInvoke.
I do this often, and allows me to quickly pop in any native library how I want.