Comment by throwaway032023 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway032023 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway032023

> It's clear just from using the language that it was designed as a more "serious" Javascript replacement

What is your usage of Dart?

JavaScript is a target platform for Dart. The Dart interop story is the point. It’s a cohesive glue language. First class interop with JavaScript, Java/Kotlin, C++ and Swift/ObjC. Community interop supports go and rust.

Maybe I am confused. We are comparing Dart to what again? Yes, Flutter is what Dart is known for and it’s, imho, important for their to be primary customer to drive evolution of language.

I don’t do JavaScript development but anytime I bump into it it’s a cluster with regards to tooling (maybe this has changed in the past 3 years). Dart comes ootb with tooling that is a cohesive experience. The technology is impressive and I think it’s filling a niche.

Dart reminds me of Python 20 years ago. Python shipped with IDLE, glued platform (win32com), corba, java, etc features together.

Dart is doing similar stuff but first class interop from the supplier (Google/dart team) for the platforms (js/wasm, mobile, desktop). It is pretty damn amazing and ambitious (maybe too ambitious?). And pub/package system is nice - dart is statically compiled and Google is one of the main innovators in software supply chain security - I think there is real possibility of it being orders of magnitude more secure than python/javascript. (This is not the case currently)

I guess I see it as a “I can stay in this world and do most of what I need”. Are there sharp edges? Yes. But the tooling and the community can resolve this fairly quickly. I don’t need to jump between abuncha languages with tooling disparaties.

For clarity, I'll admit that I do not have industry experience with Dart. I have built a medium sized mobile application with it, and have spent a pretty good deal of time digging into Flutter's architecture and reading it's source code.

If you are debating the statement I made: "It's clear just from using the language that it was designed as a more 'serious' Javascript replacement", it's simply a fact that the Dart language was originally designed to be a Javascript alternative in Chrome, and the language clearly takes a lot of inspiration for Java and C++ which are widely used at Google.

> Maybe I am confused. We are comparing Dart to what again?

I'm comparing it to other garbage collected languages. I don't think Dart really even has a backend story, but in that case I would compare it to Go, any JVM language, and Javascript/Typescript. For frontend applications I'm comparing it to Javascript/Typescript.

Maybe you could tell me what about my comment is confusing, but I'll rephase it and add some more context. From everything I've read, the Dart team at Google is small an insular. Google has a nasty reputation of cutting niche products and has been doing lots of layoffs in recent years. Even though Dart has an good UI library, there are numerous attractive alternatives that are more familiar and popular. Putting all that information together, I would not choose to use Dart for basically any new project.

> numerous attractive alternatives that are more familiar and popular

There’s React Native. Ionic is stuck in the same limbo that PWA are in and Tauri is obscure. Qt is hardly used in mobile apps and Microsoft’s successors for Xamarin deprecate themselves every few years. What else is there, NativeScript? Kivy? Delphi?

Dart is really not much different from a PWA/Ionic though: the language requires bindings to use native APIs; it's runtime is not native to any platform (where as most platforms do have native web runtimes); and it's rendering system doesn't support native widgets (in fact, it currently uses Skia which is the same rendering library as Chrome).

And yet, it has much higher adoption. I think it might be because PWA have long been second-class citizens on mobile, even with some recent OS updates.

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