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Comment by arikrak | Hacker News Reader

They're putting a positive spin on it, but it seems Google decided not to focus on Dart, considering all the other javascript's they're invested in.

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We try hard to avoid spin.

From the article:

Google Ads, one of Dart's biggest customers, is committed to Dart and supports this new strategy. Scott Silver, VP of Engineering for Ads, says, “We are committed to building our next-generation web apps with Dart, and a renewed focus on generating optimal JavaScript helps us deliver great apps to everyone with a modern browser. Dart has significantly improved our engineers' productivity and our ability to quickly launch and iterate. We currently have one million lines of Dart code and the number is growing fast.” Many other teams inside of Google, such as Google Fiber, Google Express, and Google's internal sales team, use Dart for business-critical apps.

one million lines of Dart code? All this work for displaying ads on the web. Something is not right with this world...

"Ads" is a short word but it covers a lot of complexity. There different formats for ads, different kinds of ad customers, different places where ads can be displayed, different ways of buying and selling ads, and then you have localization to different countries, etc. There are complex UI's that automatically reconfigure themselves based on the customer's needs.

A million lines of code is relatively small when you're trying to be all things to all ads customers in the world.

Still, could it be simpler? I hope so.

I read Google Ads as the business unit, not the "displaying ads". I don't really know how anyone would read "Google Ads" and "million lines+" and think wow, all that for banner ads?

Alas, I'm writing this and reading the above..

They make like $72bn annual revenue off the back of that product though so in terms of revenue per line of code it might not be too bad! :)

You do know that is how Google makes money, rigth?

If it doesn't serve ads it doesn't release cool open source projects no self driving cars, no Anjular JS, no google maps, gmail and so on.

Hey, it makes the world go 'round. Bash it all you want, it provides a useful service to businesses.

"We realized that the goal of putting Dartium in every browser was monopolistic and made us look bad, even if we had good intentions" would be avoiding spin.

This is a setback for Dart and Dart's mission statement, and everyone knows it, and everyone also knows it's been a long time coming.

Google Ads uses Dart for their next-gen web interfaces. That's a good committed user for us to have as a partner. :)

[disclaimer: I work on the dart team]

Does the Google Ads team use Dart on the server-side? The Dart blog post was unclear about the future of the Dart VM.

> Does the Google Ads team use Dart on the server-side?

This, alas, falls under the "nothing to publicly announce" umbrella.

> The Dart blog post was unclear about the future of the Dart VM.

The VM team is still moving full speed ahead. In some ways, their job is easier now because they don't have to worry about the (considerable) complexity of integrating the VM into a very large application that already has another language VM, GC, very large set of API bindings (the DOM), etc.

It's great to see that JavaScript (and the runtimes) are becoming better and better at being a sensible compilation target.

As JavaScript performance and semantics improve over time all the compile-to-JS languages benefit (Dart, Clojure, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, Elm, Scala, …). Win-win.

I'm looking fwd what the Dart team with all their experience in runtimes (& v8 specifically) can pull off with dart2js.

While I would have loved to see the Dart VM included in Chrome I believe we (the web, developers, …) are all better off with this new direction as this way browsers aren't becoming even more complex than they already are.

Google has always been pursuing a two-pronged strategy with respect to JavaScript: 1) improve JavaScript and 2) work on new and better language. What's changed is how programs written in the new language are delivered to users.

Indeed, I was hoping for a new scripting language, and if someone was going to do it would have been Google. We're stuck in a JavaScript only world until something replaces the browser ten or twenty years from now. With (nice) ECMASCript 6 and 7 changes coming and the growing use of (problematic) to-Javascript-compilers and (buggy) source maps, the will to get real language diversity on the web is just dead in the water. I don't want JavaScript everywhere. I like when there are multiple programming languages available.

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