Ecma forms TC52 for Dart Standardization | Hacker News Reader

Ecma forms TC52 for Dart Standardization

blog.chromium.org

48 pointsspankalee11 comments

Looking forward to the day when we're not afraid to abandon Javascript and look towards a more competitive development ecosystem in browsers.

doubt that will happen anytime soon, javascript will just become more like c/c++ in the next 5-10 years

Indeed, Node has given JS quite an incredible boost.

When developing low-level or systems software, there are many programming languages to choose from, but C and C++ continue to be often-chosen.

When developing software to run natively in all browsers, there's one choice: JavaScript.

So the comparison isn't fair. C/C++ had to prove themselves among many competitors. JavaScript "won" by default, not because it's somehow the best choice.

I'm glad to see other options like Dart and PNaCl coming along. It's about time.

Great to see Dart moving towards standardization. I've used it for a few projects now and have been really impressed with how quickly it's matured and how much fun it is to develop in.

This makes it sound like they want another VM alongside existing JS VMs specifically for Dart. Isn't that making the same mistake again of not specifying a general purpose VM?

There is really no such thing as a perfect general purpose VM that can run everything. This is touched upon in the Dart FAQ

https://www.dartlang.org/support/faq.html#q-why-didnt-google...

and many others, for example me

http://mozakai.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-elusive-universal-we...

I like Dart after trying it. The tools are great and the libraries are starting to come into their own. I much prefer doing WebGL development in Dart than Javascript.

However the adoption of a new VM, I think, will be challenging. It will be telling if Mozilla will develop one if this actually goes through standardization. My instinct tells me they won't and that Dart will continue on as another "transpilation," language.

> … the home of standards such as JavaScript, Eiffel, and C# …

Eiffel, scarcely used; C#, used only for some Windows development.

(I know I am misrepresenting each of these languages slightly, C# in particular as I'm ignoring Mono.)

Why are you ignoring Mono?

Not just mono, but Xamarin and Unity are huge, if interrelated uses of C#.

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