Today I finished my first Dart tutorial. For those that don’t know what Dart is, Wikipedia has a nice synopsis that I’ve included here.
Dart is an open-source Webprogramming language developed by Google. It was unveiled at the GOTO conference in Aarhus, October 10–12, 2011.[4] The goal of Dart is “ultimately to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development on the open web platform”,[5] but Dart currently relies exclusively on its cross-compilation to JavaScript feature in order to run in mainstream browsers. Dart is intended to address issues with JavaScript that Google engineers felt could not be solved by evolving the language, while offering better performance.[5] Google works on Dart to help it build more complex, full-featured client-side Web applications.[6]
Dart is a class-based, single inheritance, object-oriented language with C-style syntax. It supports interfaces, abstract classes, reifiedgenerics, and optional typing. Static type annotations do not affect the runtime semantics of the code. Instead, the type annotations can provide documentation for tools like static checkers and dynamic run time checks.
While the tutorial was simple and designd to be completed in about an hour, I found it a worthwhile and informative endeavor. It was just enough to give an introduction to the language and syntax. As the above snippet from Wikipedia states, Dart cross-compiles into JavaScript and should be familiar to people who know another C-style language.
I have a high degree of experience with object-oriented design, C++, and JavaScript and Dart has left me with a good first impression. I believe an important aspect of Dart is that it could be used to bridge the gap between C-style languages and JavaScript for programmers who do not have a lot of JavaScript experience. I do not believe that Dart will ultimately replace JavaScript, as Google hopes. JavaScript, while it has shortcomings, is ultimately very powerful and flexible. Dart’s ultimate utility will be something akin to CoffeeScript that is making it easier and less tedious to write JavaScript. In the coming weeks I may delve further into Dart, though up next I will probably do a tutorial or two on Rust.
Links: Dart 1-hour tutorial
First Impressions of Dart. http://t.co/Qj4jLKai8j