Comment by mdhb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdhb | Hacker News Reader

There is so much cool stuff at various stages of landing in the Dart pipeline at the moment. A few things that come to mind include:

1. Dart now supports the native Web platform APIs and offers a really compelling alternative to TypeScript now thanks to their their latest generation of JS interop. Example for how the code looks here: https://github.com/kevmoo/kevmoo.com/blob/main/web/main.dart

2. Compile to WASM now on the web also with future work to also align itself with the emerging WASI standards both as a compile target and the ability to embed WASI runtimes into Dart programs (technically already possible through their C interop)

3. Lots of great work on cross language interop with C, C++, Swift, Rust, Go, JavaScript, Objective C, Kotlin and Java here https://github.com/dart-lang/native

4. Upcoming Macros feature which gives fully static type safe automatic and fully debugable code generation.

5. Potentially looking at bringing Shared Memory Multithreading to the language https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/2662d252b7fa93175...

6. Also some early work on a bytecode compiler it seems but I’ve not seen any kind of announcement about it here https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/tree/main/pkg/dart2bytecode

7. This REPL

It’s really a good time to be a part of the community. It’s a very bright looking future for it.

Dart's only reason it is still among us is Flutter, if Google ever gets fed up with Flutter, it will fizzle out.

Meanwhile other programming language ecosystems have plenty of domains that keep them relevant no matter what.

I’ve seen you specifically make this exact same argument in almost every single thread that’s ever about Dart of Flutter for I think at least two years now. It’s a really weird fixation you seem to have.

It’s never come true, you’re talking nonsense just like every other time people try to politely explain it to you.

And yet you felt attacked to waste time replying, interesting....

If there’s a point in here I can’t find it.

I don’t “feel attacked” more frustrated that you’re here yet again to make the same crappy points knowing full well you have zero interest in having a real conversation or changing your mind.

It’s more akin to dealing with the drunk uncle at Christmas who tries to trap you into the same argumentative conversations that he did the past 3 years.

IMHO, some people just really want Dart and Flutter to fail, so they post the same tired doom prophecy in hope it will become self-fulfilling.

What is also annoying is that they come to normal Dart/Flutter related threads just to spoil them.

Meanwhile, the ecosystem grows, more and more people and companies choose Dart and Flutter and have fun creating software with this excellent toolchain.

The dogs bark, but the caravan goes on, as they say.

He posts a boilerplate comment slightly rephrased hundreds of times for several subjects, not just Dart. e.g. see any time Proton games on Linux comes up.

I hear this a lot. I don't really see Google getting fed up with flutter, due to what they have invested in it, but for the sake of argument let's say that did happen. Google abandons flutter. What happens next? Will it fizzle out?

To take your point about the domains, flutter's, and by association dart's, domain is cross platform development from one codebase. As far as I can tell nothing else comes close just now, that domain makes flutter relevant no matter what. Surely as opensources projects, both survive?

Open source only helps so much, depending on how many skilled developers are willing to take it forward.

How many programming languages and frameworks are out there as open source, that in reality are only limping along?

True enough, but I think flutter/dart have enough traction beyond Google that they'd survive. I like dart as a general purpose language too.

I wasn't aware of that bytecode compiler, even though I work with Flutter/Dart on a daily basis. How did you find out?

Nonetheless, that’s some low level stuff that I have little experience with haha.

I spend some time each week just browsing the various repos under the Dart account to see what’s going on in the ecosystem and that turned up recently but as I said there no kind of announcement so I would take them very literally when they say it’s an experiment.

Where is JS Interop used in the first example? (It's a bit hard to tell with the wildcard imports how much of that is actually coming from web.dart.)

Web.dart is basically designed to give you the equivalent of any of the browser based APIs you would find on MDN essentially unchanged so things like document.querySelectorAll and things like that would just work as though you were using JavaScript (and you technically are in the background) but without otherwise needing to ever leave Dart.

Well, sure, but web.dart is one of the original packages that came with Dart. That part isn't new.

That’s not actually correct I don’t know where you got that from. This is from this year and was built on top of a wider rewrite of their JS interop using new language features to make it essentially a zero cost abstraction.

Dart has had browser support and DOM APIs before but never had the same APIs you have in the web platform before.

I think I had it confused with dart:html, which looks almost the same. I don't see a big difference in the example code.

> It’s a very bright looking future for it.

Err... At Google? After laying off the core maintainers? Not bright at all.

That literally never happened.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1cduhra/more_la...

Yes, there were layoffs. But "core maintainers" is not a term they use, and kind of fuzzy since people come and go; some early team members left well before then. People didn't all leave (or get laid off) at the same time, and they never laid off the entire team as far as I know.

More:

https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1cduhra/comment...

Sure, whatever.

The one major company backing a project lays off a number of the team working on the project.

That is not exactly the signal of a bright future.

It would be cool if you could apply even the most basic reading comprehension here where it says there was zero change in team size and stop spreading nonsense.

Ok.

Here’s the top comment from the Reddit post that was linked

> Hey folks! Kevin, product manager on Flutter and Dart here.

> The layoffs were decided AT LEAST a couple of layers above our team and affected a LOT of teams. (I think I can say that). Lots of good folks got bad news and lots of great projects lost people. Flutter and Dart were not affected any more or less that others. It was a tough day...tough week.

Can you comprehend that?

Did you see the comment below the post?

> Hey folks! Kevin, product manager on Flutter and Dart here.

> The layoffs were decided AT LEAST a couple of layers above our team [...]

> Flutter and Dart were not affected any more or less that others.

That's exactly the post that confirms the layoffs and that Google moved some clueless extras to fill the gap. Which means the core maintainers were laid off. If one think that removing the main team of a project won't affect its speed and quality, one is absolutely delusional.

JFC how many times do you need to be told that what you’re claiming didn’t happen. You’ve been caught multiple times just straight up making up entire story lines that exist only in your head rather than just admitting that you had some bad information.

It’s genuinely one of the weirdest things I’ve seen on here in some time.

You seem to have issues with anger management and frustration related to people disliking Google because of how they often kill products they use. Screaming "It didn't happen" don't change thevfact that a big part of the team was laid off. Adding "headcount" doesn't change that.

Also, if you can't talk without offending and going out of your mind, you can just respect this forum guidelines and say nothing.

> a big part of the team was laid off

This didn’t happen the Flutter / Dart team specifically. You are portraying this as an issue with Flutter only.

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