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Comment by gauravk92 | Hacker News Reader

AS3 -> Dart -> JS, a bit much don't you think? I'm not sure who is trying to use a web stack three levels deep and dart based no less. I'm skeptical of how long dart is going to last at google, but this is definitely an impressive piece of work regardless. If it was AS3 -> JS and worked as well as it does now, i feel the web would collectively lose its shit. Unfortunately though this is tied to google, and i don't think many people want to be stuck being supported solely by google anymore.

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>AS3 -> Dart -> JS, a bit much don't you think?

That's not what this is. The API has been ported, they haven't written a AS3 -> Dart compiler.

Still, it's an indirection because AS3 primitives are not Dart primitives.

I've never used it, but jangaroo seems promising

http://www.jangaroo.net/home/

Example:

http://www.jangaroo.net/files/examples/flash/open-flash-char...

Agreed. I would be inclined to invest my energy in a new platform that was built for HTML5 from the get go.

This might be useful as stop-gap. But I would hate to bug-test anything built using this method.

think of all the AS3 developers starting to feel left out in the cold now that Adobe's walking away from Flash.

while i'd agree that now's probably the time to jump into JS and HTML5, some people think Dart has a future, and I guess this opens up its potential market.

Adobe is walking away from the mobile player but still has Air out in the wild wich produces a lot of good chart topping titles on the Android and iOS app stores.

In my opinion, it is better to pick up Haxe if someone is coming from AS3. You can use javascript for the HTML5 compile target, you get extended Mr. Doob three.js support provided by the author himself, node.js through the Noxe Lib extends, and much more. And that is just for the HTML5 target.

It even target compiles to Android and iOS through the Haxe NME framework.

They are adding Java support to the thing and it has been doing c++ and php for some years. There are no silly ";" fights and honestly it is good to be able to use the same code source to run on multiple plats.

Though Dart may well pick up and Easel is already becoming a thing.

agreed. Dart even though it has some awesome features, is still a technology preview, so I also wonder when it will be "stable" (some apis aren't "finished" yet) and it's a Google only thing. On the project's github page, you can read "The problem with JavaScript is that it sucks." ... JavaScript sucks if you don't know how it works, just like another language ... and what's the point of writting this when Dart itself compiles to JavaScript (who the fuck uses Dartium as their primary browser), finally the demo throws 18 errors ... fail.

> so I also wonder when it will be "stable"

It should be out of technology preview later this year.

> JavaScript sucks if you don't know how it works

It's possible to understand JS and want better. I think the people behind V8 and Dart know how JS works.

> what's the point of writting this when Dart itself compiles to JavaScript

What's the point of writing anything in any language? The Dart VM will be included with Chrome and other browsers are free to include one, too; Dart->JS is for browsers that don't and the goal is that it'll perform similar to hand-written JS.

> who the fuck uses Dartium as their primary browser

Nobody. It's for development until the Dart VM is included with Chrome.

Exactly -- that's why this is exciting, particularly the Flash / interactive part. The authors have done a very good job with what they have to work with, with the assumption that they're only working with a preview and that the primary medium will be a VM with a JS fallback. The performance, all said, is very, very good.

"finally the demo throws 18 errors ... fail."

I just runned it on FireFox and Chrome, and it didn't have a single error, you running the demo on what browser ? Did you even run the demo ?

This is a good start for anyone wanting to learn what Dartium is: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/google-has-released-...

Stay happy.

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