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Comment by thorum | Hacker News Reader

Have people found Dart to be a useful programming language for purposes other than Flutter? Does it provide a benefit over existing languages for other kinds of tasks?

I like a lot of what Flutter offers for cross-platform development, but it's hard for me to justify the cost of learning a separate language just for one tool, versus (for example) React Native which uses a multipurpose language with a massive ecosystem of existing libraries and tooling.

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We've been using Dart for years on a successful web app, front-end, back-end, and tooling. It's simple to learn. We've had devs experienced in C++ contributing to the codebase in a couple of days without any prior exposure. It's a great general purpose language, and with recent addition of extension methods and NNBD coming soon, it's getting even better. Ecosystem isn't as extensive as JS world, but it's pretty good. (As someone else in this thread stated, I too dislike the required semicolons, but no biggie, and there's an issue to perhaps remove or make them optional, maybe it'll happen eventually)

Give the language tour a quick look: https://dart.dev/guides/language/language-tour

I've been using Dart since the start (~8 years ago), and follow language development very closely.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

I discovered Flutter recently and love it! I want to buy in all the way. Could you go more into your experiences, especially with backend and tooling? I'm pretty sold on it for web dev, as I spent a ton of time trying to get into react/react native and am ready to move one. I guess my main concern is support for libraries. I don't recall seeing Dart libraries for most GCP/AWS services. And what about all of the bajillion clients and neat stuff that has already been written for say Python. I feel like it's a tough pill to swallow to say goodbye to that stuff.

There is a package for gcloud (and also googleapis), and we are closing in to generate AWS API client libraries from the API definition JSONs.

I personally use Dart for almost every task.

Frontend - Flutter for the UI (Android, iOS and Web) Backend REST Services - Pure Dart or Aqueduct.io for more complex apps Scripting on my PC Command Line Interfaces for different Tools Advent of Code solutions Blockchain stuff Chat bots ... much more

So why do I like Dart?

The default libraries are amazing - dart:convert, dart:io and more. The asynchronous language features like async, Future and Streams are the best ones I found in a language until now. The Dart and especially Flutter docs (just look at the animation curves section) as well as the official YouTube videos do a great job of teaching different subjects. The combination of dynamic and statically typed objects and variables works really well in most cases. The List and Map operators are really good and easy to use. Package management with pub works and is fast.

Disadvantages

The Ecosystem for non-mobile apps needs more libs.

Conclusion

Try Flutter and see if you like working with Dart, it's very easy to pick up.

I really like Flutter, infact it's the first language I've been really excited about since Python back in college, but I worry about learning something like Aqueduct.io. I feel like the biggest con with Flutter is that there are not that many resources relative to React Native, i fear the server frameworks would be even worse.

Definitely gonna try flutter for web though--im ready to say goodbye to React completely.

I’m not a huge fan of Dart (too OOP for my tastes), but if you know JavaScript or Java it is really easy to pick up. The only thing I struggled with are the required semi colons!

I have spoken to people who have used it for backend code, though that is rare.

Google uses it for web apps and the Dart team itself uses Dart for all their command line tools.

In the latest release they added support for creating standalone binaries. I haven't tried it but it sounds promising.

There is a good package manager and a decent selection of libraries. I haven't tried it out lately though.

Learning the language is going to be like 3% of learning Flutter/Mobile development.

Apperantly, "Google builds many critical web apps using the Dart language, often with AngularDart." [1]

I have never heard this from anyone else though.

[1]https://dart.dev/web

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