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Comment by comex | Hacker News Reader

Why do you want it to be supported in Chrome? Any performance improvements seen by your users won't apply to those using any other browser.

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> Any performance improvements seen by your users won't apply to those using any other browser.

But it will apply to those using Chrome (their performance benchmarks show consistent improvement, sometimes up to 2x) and it will be using a better language for all the other ones.

Because then his userbase goes from being an extremely small niche(chromium is probably less than 1%) to a much larger niche(chrome is more than 30%).

Do you mean that Chromium now has a Dart VM? The last time I checked it didn't, there was a buggy thing called Dartium.

Dartium is still separate to Chromium.

Dart -- without being in Chrome -- has the same userbase as CoffeeScript, ClojureScript, or any other language that also compiles to JavaScript.

There are some real potential wins with being in Chrome, many of which are political, but there are no technical reasons for not being in Chrome to block Dart's adoption.

Except Dart isn't trying to be another "compiles to javascript" language like CS, Dart is trying to completely replace js which is why it's so much more difficult to implement. They have to build an entire VM to rival V8.

The point is that if you write in Dart you still have a very large target audience without the VM.

Sure, Dart's designed to have even more benefit when run in it's own VM, but that doesn't affect its reach.

> Any performance improvements seen by your users won't apply to those using any other browser.

It will be still about as fast as regular JavaScript.

I will say that you won't need to rely on JavaScript, .dart files size are a lot smaller and the code starts and execute faster.

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