Well TypeScript also had a huge corporation with infinite budget and a large full time team of contributors and evangelists which probably helped adoption.
If corporate support is a definite factor, Dart would have taken off way earlier than now. A bigger factor in TypeScript's success would be the ability to gradually migrate the projects as it's a superset of JavaScript. How do you start migrating? Flip the file extensions from .js to .ts with loose compiler options, then gradually add typing as the options are tightened. It's factors like these that drive spread of language, not "huge corporation with infinite budget and a large full time team of contributors and evangelists." Dart had no short of those and still not much accepted.
you can target mobile with Flutter, and also command-line etc.
Now the Flutter project is Dart's last hope to keep it relevant outside Google.
It remains to be seen how serious Google is about Flutter, as the Android team only gives political correct answers when inquired about Flutter vs Android.
There are other languages pushed by a big corporation that fail so having the big corporation is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
But you might be remembering the old Dart IDE, which was based on Eclipse.
Drives me nuts.
I find that searching on "golang" generally does the trick.
From an external perspective, Google's enthusiasm for Dart seemed half-hearted at best. Its launch was encumbered by rocky political issues, with half the community terrified that they were looking at a new VBScript, and Google's competitors actively stoking said terrors. It could've jeopardized Chrome's ascendance by turning off tech people, on whom any new software depends for propagation, and giving MS/Apple/Mozilla some room to doubt Google's commitment to the extant web, and that was surely enough to make pouring heavy resources into it a non-starter from a business perspective. It's naive to believe that any technical considerations entered into it.
Take a look at Kubernetes if you want to see what happens when Google is committed to using that G-Juice to cram something down the community's throat.
In short, some folks at Google had ambitions for Dart to eventually become a web standard with an interpreter built in to browsers, with compile-to-JavaScript used for the transition. That was a radical, unpopular idea and didn't happen even for Chrome, but Dart lives on as a nice compile-to-JavaScript language, and has new life on mobile due to Flutter.
Microsoft had a much more conservative strategy with Typescript and executed on it better. Having modest goals was a big win there.
Remember how developers shunned Windows Phone and paid lip service to firefox os, and everything else apart from IOS and android?
Well, you can see how the power is surely corrupting Google. If you don't see it now, give it time. But it's even too late right now.
No amount of bitching will make Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and other "big bullies" play nice. What will? Strong, credible competitive threats.
You think Intel processors are expensive? Without AMD Intel processors would cost 4x as much. How much battery life would Intel PCs have without ARM? In fact, I assure you that without AMD, ARM would also be dead because Intel would have simply forbidden their partners from using ARM - the same way Google discourages top android manufacturers from using android forks.
About ur catholic reference - there's only one reason why Catholic churches are "pretty chill these days." And that's competition. New protestant churches are sprouting like grasses everywhere - competition has diluted the power of the church.
Competition is the key to niceness. Just look at the behavior of US ISPs.
The reason it's not all about power/competition is that corruption is very easy to get into your system; be that individual, corporate or otherwise; and tricky as hell to weed out. Once you've been there and done that, the bar is set lower for relapse.
If Chrome team actually cared about Dart and went ahead with Dartium's integration, Dart's future would have been much different.
Then the Angular team decided to dump Dart and go with Typescript.
So politics as usual.
And in addition to not having full support from Google, there was not and probably would never have been buy-in from Mozilla or Microsoft. Also the language IMHO didn't offer much more than JavaScript, and 6to5 -> Babel was gaining traction at the same time. It wasn't a good recipe for success.
I think it was smart of Google of giving it a fair trial and cut its loss when it was time before it got embarrassing or "coffeescript costly" for many developers.
The problem is that all of those new "beautiful" languages is that they trade pragmatism for purity, but at the end, we all have stuff to build, and at the end of the day, a well known, well tested, and good enough language with some modern construct (a la TypeScript and ES2016+) can become a very powerful tool to build small to big code base, whereas a beautiful near perfect languages would have brought us lot of development frictions or little exhilaration.
There is a reason why the Chrome team was not really into it, and they might have been right, but regardless, they should not be blamed for Dart's fall. As developers, I do not think we want another GWT or Google Gear kind of experience.
TypeScript is successful because it solves the right problem the right way, i.e., adding type without changing everything else around it.
See the discussions of soundness versus usability in typescript where they took a lot of heat from some people, but I believe absolutely have made the correct compromises.
Disclaimer: have never used Typescript.
It's not a surprise at all that the likes of Microsoft and Google and Mozilla are able to promote and push new languages to significant widespread adoption.
*Not so obscure anymore; Motion-Twin is well known for the hit game Dead Cells, and their former employee, Nicolas Cannasse, who is credited with inventing Haxe, went on to found his own studio with its own successful games (Northgard especially)