I'd like to Dart to happen. What worries my is that Dart has Java EE mentality. Hipster programmers won't touch it and lack of traction may kill the project. What's the solution? Performance may be a great USP. Rewrite Gmail in Dart, so tools like Streak, Rapportive and other extensions won't kill the performance.
We aren't planning it, we've already done it. Dart comes with a command-line VM with a full-featured (IO, networking, etc.) set of libraries[1].
The performance is quite good and getting better[2], from what I understand.
[1]: https://api.dartlang.org/apidocs/channels/stable/dartdoc-vie... [2]: https://www.dartlang.org/performance/io/
[disclaimer: I work on the Dart team.]
I/O performance increased drastically with 1.3. The performance is tracked over here:
https://www.dartlang.org/performance/io/
1.4 added experimental support for ServerSocket references, which allow you to share a socket across isolates (~"workers"):
https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!topic/misc/...
[1] https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/pull/864
Redstone is becoming increasingly popular: http://luizmineo.github.io/redstone.dart/
Whilst I've built a simple Express-like API: https://github.com/dartist/express
Which also includes a complete port of node's popular jade view engine: https://github.com/dartist/jaded