Google releases Dart 1.0, says language is ready for Web
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Now that the language is a stable target I am really looking forward to seeing what sorts of libraries can come forward and also how performance can improve using the VM on the server side.
Warning: The rest of this comment is somewhat controversial and speculative. Feel free to skip it if that is not what you want.
In the bigger scheme of things I have somewhat conflicted feelings about Dart. Google has been trying very hard over the last few years to kill whatever positive feelings I had towards it for their open-source, open-web stance. A million little things like dragging their feet on chrome/webkit prefixes, google+ infiltrating everything, etc, etc have made me more appreciative than ever for Firefox and Mozilla. But in the 2 years since Dart was announced it has gone from a basic spec and vm to a fully functional and pretty great language and vm, while Javascript has languished in committee as more slop is packed in while the basics (numerical types, non-terrible type coercion) are ignored. The current target is a late 2014 release date. How much further will Dart and its VM be by then!?
I love Dart for what it lets me do right now, and for its commitment to compiling to javascript so everyone can use it. But it's hard to trust that google won't use it as some sort of competitive weapon in the future. And so I am stuck, wanting to support the open web, while being unable to stand the leap back in time and productivity that is developing in Javascript.
I guess the only thing to do is focus on getting things done in the here and now and let the future take care of itself. And right here and now Dart is a pretty compelling package.