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Comment by sethladd | Hacker News Reader

Dart compiles to JavaScript, is open source, and is now in ECMA. The project has mostly Google engineers committing, but we also have plenty of open-source contributions.

asm.js is a compile target that takes C/C++ code and outputs lots of typed arrays, and a custom engine to interpret the asm.js "hints". It's an interesting way to get C code onto the web, but developers don't write asm.js code by hand. In contrast, Dart is designed to be written by developers. The similarity is that both asm.js and Dart want to enable faster experiences for users, but they take very different approaches.

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I thought that asm.js would be a compile target for any language, not just C/C++. E.g. you could have dart2asm instead of dart2js.

As far as I understand, the semantics of asm.js make that not very interesting.

Unfortunately right now asm.js is an unsuitable target for any dynamically typed language with garbage collection, because you have to run your whole runtime system and a garbage collector as asm.js'ied code, which is not exactly what you want in terms of overhead. Asm.js is a target for anything that is statically typed and low-level (e.g. C).

Ah. Thanks for the info.

> The project has mostly Google engineers committing, but we also have plenty of open-source contributions.

How many within the first year of it's development?

Good question, I'd have to run some queries. dart.googlecode.com and github.com/dart-lang are the two main locations. We receive more patches for the libraries and docs than we do for the VM. But we have received patches for dart2js (a fairly complicated bit of code).

According to the history of the AUTHORS file (commits are not properly attributed in the repository, as far as I can see) there were 12 "external contributors" in the first year of dart (as a public project anyway): https://code.google.com/p/dart/source/browse/branches/bleedi...

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