Dart is on Chromium – and Dart meets Scala
grobmeier.de
grobmeier.de
It seems there are two kinds of new languages. The ones that inspire new thinking about problems but never catch on, and the ones that are small variations of C/Java, inspire no new thinking whatsoever but still cause lots of boring transition issues if they catch on.
Nobody is going to write a website that doesn't render well across the major browsers, so anyone who codes in Dart will just configure their site to either serve Dart->JS converted code or Dart depending on if the user is in Chrome.
End result? Web keeps working just as it always has. Chrome users get a better experience, but non-Chrome users get a similar experience to what they already get.
If this drives more people towards Chrome -- good. Maybe that will convince other browser manufacturers to get off their asses and either really evolve JavaScript to be competitive (instead of the constant chants of 'Just wait until the next version... going to be awesome then!'), or just adopt Dart.
The web evolving is much more important than mindlessly following existing "standards". Nothing good ever comes from formal standardization processes... the best we can hope for is standardization after the fact.
JavaScript itself was something Netscape threw into Navigator, the standardization came later. Same exact situation (possibly) as Dart, if it is successful. This is a good thing.
If Dart can't beat JS on the merits, it will die because developers won't adopt it. If it can beat JavaScript on the merits, then good on it, competition is a good thing. Remember?
* More divergence in browser script runtimes
* More divergence in standard libraries in script runtimes
* Slower performance than native JS due to Dart cross-compilation in non-Chromium browsers
* A more difficult debugging experience for Dart authors and regular web users due to obfuscated dart JS, bugs in dart runtimes, and bugs in dart compilers
seems like evolution to you? Dart does absolutely nothing useful at present. Your claim that Dart will just 'die off' if it lacks merit because of developers rejecting it is ridiculous. Google will shove it down everyone's throats whether it's good or not.
I for one am really looking forward to a stable Dart. My company is as well.
Both of those seem exactly like evolution. Evolution --as in real life-- is all about divergence...
The slower performance than native JS issue remains to be seen. I believe Dart, when fully baked, will generate code very similar in performance to "native" JS. In fact, I think it'll probably be better than your average hand-rolled JS code that doesn't use something like Google's Closure Compiler already. In any case, unless the generated code is substantially slower than "native" JavaScript (which there is no basis to believe will be true), this is a bit disingenuous of an argument coming from the web crowd who also advocate writing mobile web apps instead of native apps where you're taking a big speed hit for other benefits. Software is all about making trade-offs (hopefully the right ones).
As far as a more difficult debugging experience -- I think Dart will offer the opposite, a much richer debugging experience for the developer's own code in the form of debugging within the native Dart VM. The non-Google developer shouldn't have to debug issues that arise due to the JS translation layer, that's on Google to get right, and again if they don't get that right developers just won't use the technology. I certainly think that whatever Dart's debugging experience ends up being will be much better than the debugging experience for CoffeeScript and other X->JS languages that the JavaScript-only crowd like to reference when talking about how JavaScript is already an adequate "VM".
As far as Google shoving it down everyone's throat -- what is your basis for that claim? What have they shoved down everyone's throat so far? Wave? With all due respect to Google, they don't have the power to shove anything down developer's throats. They can simply develop new technology and hope that it offers developers enough real-world benefit that they will adopt it organically.