Google's Dart Language Reaches 2.8 Milestone With New Features

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Google's Dart Language Reaches 2.8 Milestone With New Features

It's been a while since hearing much out of the Google-backed Dart programming language for designing UI-focused cross-platform applications and its ability to compile to JavaScript or native code. But out today is Dart 2.8 as the latest step forward for this language...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Google-Dart-2.8-Released

[cen1]

I don't know a single person that uses dart. Nor a single FOSS project I usually work with that uses it.

[cl333r]

I don't know a single person that uses dart. Nor a single FOSS project I usually work with that uses it.

Probably because IE, Chrome & Firefox need to support it to be a viable mainstream solution.

[marccollin]

google could have used it for angular instead of typescript... angulardart exist but it's a old release....

[c117152]

I don't know a single person that uses dart. Nor a single FOSS project I usually work with that uses it.

Flutter uses Dart. Which, in principle, makes sense. We need an class-based C-like domain-specific language for GUIs seeing how Tcl/Tk is too antiquated while GTK is just nasty to work with like most object-oriented-in-C libraries. But they got lazy and went with C++ leaving the devs thinking "if I'm stuck with C++ in my tool chain I might as well just use C++ and Qt specifically".

It's sad really. I often end up writing small GUIs in Nuklear or straight sdl precisely because of the above despite knowing I'm shooting myself in the foot giving up on i18n and bidi support and even sane keyboard events handling... And when it's time to scale it I just jump to Qt and C++... Awful but beats the alternatives. And believe me, I tried them all.

I guess the dream would be a big company feature completing SDL and writing proper Lua bindings and a widget library targeting. Sanity restored.

[scottishduck]

Dart is the main language to be used by applications in Fuschia so, like it or not, it's going to play a big part in google's future.

[Comevius]

I don't know a single person that uses dart. Nor a single FOSS project I usually work with that uses it.

Dart is the fastest growing language according to GitHub thanks to Flutter:

https://octoverse.github.com/

[uid313]

Probably because IE, Chrome & Firefox need to support it to be a viable mainstream solution.

No, because Dart can be transpiled down into JavaScript.
TypeScript isn't supported by any web browser either, but it transpiles down to JavaScript and while Dart isn't popular, TypeScript is very popular (among web developers).

Flutter uses Dart. Which, in principle, makes sense. We need an class-based C-like domain-specific language for GUIs seeing how Tcl/Tk is too antiquated while GTK is just nasty to work with like most object-oriented-in-C libraries. But they got lazy and went with C++ leaving the devs thinking "if I'm stuck with C++ in my tool chain I might as well just use C++ and Qt specifically".

It's sad really. I often end up writing small GUIs in Nuklear or straight sdl precisely because of the above despite knowing I'm shooting myself in the foot giving up on i18n and bidi support and even sane keyboard events handling... And when it's time to scale it I just jump to Qt and C++... Awful but beats the alternatives. And believe me, I tried them all.

I guess the dream would be a big company feature completing SDL and writing proper Lua bindings and a widget library targeting. Sanity restored.

I think GTK is pretty okay. It has some stuff I don't like about it, but some of that is getting fixed with the upcoming GTK 4. You have to call show() or show_all() on all widgets, else they don't show after being added (this is fixed in GTK 4). There are no standardized colors so if you assign a color to anything then it might look bad when using another theme. After expanding a GtkExpander the window grows, but when collapsing it the window does not collapse. Scrolling is implemented differently in different widgets.
The GTK Builder XML structure is pretty bad which makes it difficult to move around widgets in the code.
GTK 4 is getting a new layout coordinator that I think is like ConstraintLayout in Android.

I haven't used GTK in C, just over GObject Introspection (GI) in Python, and then the API is object-oriented.

I haven't used Qt much, but I think it was pretty okay too.

I quickly tried WPF and Avalonia a little (which is inspired by WPF but cross-platform), both of them based on XAML, and I felt it had a steeper learning curve.

[bug77]

I don't know a single person that uses dart. Nor a single FOSS project I usually work with that uses it.

I was so psyched over Dart back when it got some browser support. Repurposing the language on the server-side, killed it outright. In the browser, it was a breath of fresh air next to JS. On the server, it's an "also ran" at best.

[cl333r]

Dart isn't popular, TypeScript is very popular (among web developers).

From googling its clear the main and only relevant reason is because TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript. And this gave TS a greater market share which triggered catch 22.