Google's JavaScript-slaying-improving Dart lets fly with version 1.0

Google has reached a significant milestone in the development of Dart, its JavaScript replacement language, with the release of the first production-ready version. Dart is designed to make it easier to develop complex web applications by avoiding some of the language shortcomings that make large JavaScript applications …

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds great, until they get bored with it and goes the way that many other googles projects, aka kills it off.

[ThomH]

Between this and PNaCl it sounds like Google has two broadly similar irons in the fire. Buyer beware.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stage one of Google's attempt to own the WWW.

Well actually their other attempt (HTML5 video) failed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dart's open source, so competitors can include the Google implementation in their own applications - even closed source ones since it's under the BSD license. And MicroSoft have got this right as well, since TypeScript is under the Apache license. However, I have to agree with this comment from the Dart FAQ as to why making a superset of JavaScript is a bad idea:

"Dart purposely made a break from certain parts of JavaScript’s syntax and semantics in order to eradicate large classes of bugs and to improve performance"

To paraphrase Alan Kay, adding features to JavaScript is like nailing legs to a dog in order to make an octopus.

[Stevie]

Hurrah!

May I congratulate Google on their belated but nonetheless welcome joining the ranks of GROUJN (Get Rid Of Useless JavaScript Now).

Now I f only they can be talked out of this "Dart" madness we can close the window on XSS attacks for good.

[Anonymous Coward]

First Noscript

Looks like we will be needing nodart as well.

[Kris]

Will never fly

[Anonymous Coward]

On the one hand

ALL HAIL DART! No more useless clunky javascript that doesn't run correctly despite being written perfectly, until you put in a work around for that kink in IE, and then another to fix the kink the IE fix put into chrome etc etc etc.

On the other hand. How long will google keep it going? I mean I trust google to keep a web based scripting language going far more than I do microsoft (hey psst hey how's silverlight doing? Oh... ASP? That got replaced by .NET you say? What about blah blah blah)

On the fragmented side of things and how they should focus on 'making it better', I'm going to compare javascript to what I work on.

It started out simple many years ago, and gradually the world changed. We had to add a basic interface so language A had to have language B built on top for a simple text interface. Language B worked fine for a while but then started creeping into language As job, and the text interface wasn't modern any more, so we stripped back language B a little and put in language C for the interface, which still relied on calls by language B to language A. Now a few years on that interface was dated, so was replaced with language D, so we now have D calling C calling B calling A and various bits in between with design patterns layered atop design patterns. It's a mess. We can improve it and we are trying to do so every day.

At the same time however we're all agreed that it would be quicker, easier, and more efficient to scrap the entire code base and start over with just A and D since B and C are just doing As job badly.

Javascript seems to be at that point.

[RyokuMas]

One word:

"Inheritance"

I'm already more sold on this that Javascript...

[phil dude]

convertor...

I do like the fact it can be converted to javascript. Perhaps the tools that convert C++ to javascript will do C++ to Dart and then we can have optimised Js for legacy reasons....

All in all a good thing?

P.

[cs94njw]

"Microsoft and others have criticized Google for attempting to fragment the web development community by introducing a new client-side language that competes with JavaScript, rather than improving it."

Cheeky sods. Pot. Kettle. Black.