- Is dynamically typed at the core
- Has no support for nullability
- Has old school syntax for constructors, semi colons
In other words, Dart on the wrong side of history for pretty much every single important feature for programming languages in 2020.
Even C# looks more modern than Dart from a design perspective, and C# is fifteen years old.
- that's currently true but in the next release (at least that's what the Dart team have been working on for the past several months) it will have nullable types just like Kotlin.
- That's a strange criticism. Dart has excellent constructor syntax, I don't know a language that is more flexible with constructors.
e.g.
class Person {
String name;
int age;
Person(this.name, this.age);
String toString() => "Person($name, $age)";
}
main() => print(Person("Joe", 40));
There's some work being done to overcome this but so far no solution has seen the daylight in practice.
I don't think Kotlin is performant enough for Flutter though.
ART is able to do several nice optimizations, including vector instructions, and uses a mix of JIT/AOT with PGO.
Kotlin is performance enough, hence Jetpack Composer.
That's _far_ from performant for the use case in question.
A quite big one actually.
That has nothing to do with performance, and plenty to do with storage space and download times, as anyone knowledgable how compilers work is well aware of.
yeah, whole 4,5 mb....
Is Android-specific, created specifically for Android, and it's almost as if the aim here was to develop a cross-platform framework that could at least target the two major mobile OSes in existence, one of which ships with literally zero Java anything. I brought up HotSpot because that's (part of) the canonical, actually-built-to-run-on-multiple-platforms JRE.
- Kotlin/Native
The state of Kotlin/Native is _far_ shabbier than the state of AOT-compiled Dart, and that's in 2020 (not, you know, 2014 when Flutter (then Sky) initially kicked off). It's interesting to me how in discussions like this people act as though the development of the project in question started literally yesterday.
I guess the lack of mature libraries and integration issues with Android native APIs is one reason why we consider it a language started yesterday.
- should target multiple mobile and desktop platforms (and not, like you seem to think, Android first or alone)
- is a game engine style, Skia-backed project, which you are essentially trying to pick a scripting language for.
So, do you actually have anything to back up Dart's runtime being a worse investment than your proposed ideas (which seem to be "go the way of Multi-OS Engine, that notoriously successful project" and/or "wait half a decade more for AOT compilation that would still be in beta and in a worse state than what we already have")?