Google has released Dartium, a Chromium build with a Dart VM | Hacker News Reader

Google has released Dartium, a Chromium build with a Dart VM

arstechnica.com

30 points3lit3H4ck3r11 comments

  > Much like Microsoft's VBScript, Dart is a nonstandard
  > client language that is developed and supported by a
  > single vendor outside of the Web standards process.

Now that's just bursting at the seams with thinly veiled disapproval. Also, not quite correct, as far as I'm concerned.

> Also, not quite correct, as far as I'm concerned.

How far are you concerned?

Dart is open source, right? Not developed by a single vendor depending on whether they have a accepted any patches and what you consider a vendor.

Likelihood is they haven't accepted any patches, and if they have they would have been very small and minor.

Additionally, something can trivially be both open-source and non-standard and vendor specific. With the amount of Chrome specific code in Dartium, it might as well be proprietary.

Open source is not a specification. Imagine if JavaScript was specified as "what SpiderMonkey does". Then there's the issue that Google didn't make many friends by letting the other browser vendors in the dark until they had a more or less finished product. As a consequence the language has some rather questionable design decisions like the much discussed covariant array issue as well as purely syntactic ones. Additionally I'm rather sure that some browser vendors (especially Mozilla and Microsoft) are not so thrilled having to import and integrate a code base into their own products which is solely controlled by Google.

Dart will be submitted for standardization once they have specs finished.

JavaScript was standardized two years after its appearance in the shipping browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript

And Microsoft will likely never support it, so until IE dies completely (still around 50% market share total), this is a pointless exercise, and is likely to cause more confusion and wasted time than it will help web developers.

Wave died, Google Buzz died, Google+ is stillborn, not everything google does is magic. Until IE supports Dart natively, I won't be wasting any of my time with it. I don't care that Dart compiles to javascript, it's not a substitute for javascript that runs inside the browser.

First, Dart has a specification that's independent of Google's implementation(s). There are several implementations, which track the spec to varying degrees. See http://www.dartlang.org/docs/spec/index.html

Second, Dart is far from finished. It was unveiled early, precisely so interested parties could try it out and provide feedback while the spec was still evolving.

Third, development is happening in full view, with a public source code repository, public mailing lists, public bug tracking and public code review. AFAIK all the committers are still at Google, but it's a far more open process than the one that created Javascript, and not even comparable to VBScript.

Finally, Javascript is defined as "what SpiderMonkey does." Ok, it's fairly well documented, and the source is available for inspection. But Javascript is a proprietary language owned by Mozilla. ECMAScript is the open standard, and there are significant differences between that and the Javascript implementation that's included in Firefox. Why isn't anyone jumping up and down about how Mozilla is breaking the web by shipping a non-standard proprietary language controlled by one company?

I'm not a Google apologist; they've definitely done some evil things lately. But Dart isn't one of them. AFAICT, they've tried to strike a careful balance between including the web community in the design and implementation of Dart, while still holding to their vision of what web programming could be, and advancing towards it. I think they've done a pretty good job and I don't see what they could have done better. Herding cats is hard.

[edit - fixed punctuation]

I hate to be that guy, but I really don't see Dart going anywhere (at least inside a browser). Microsoft will probably never support it. For the same reason, it's not looking good in any other browsers either. Even if it did get immediate and full-spectrum support, it would be years before you can do anything with it (without compiling down to JS in order to support older browsers which makes using it kind of useless anyway).

If I really wanted to write in a new language just to compile to JavaScript, I'd be using CoffeeScript already.

Can someone explain why this is a preferable solution to fixing the problems with JavaScript? Or say CoffeeScript?

Unless/until ClojureScript can target it, I'm not convinced I care.

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