Analysis of Google Dart 171
An anonymous reader writes "Google's new language landed with a loud thud, causing lots of interesting debates about the best place to stick semicolons... An article [in InfoQ] ... looks at some of the less discussed features. Snapshots seem to bring something like Smalltalk images and allow instant startup of applications (something Java has spent the last 15 years not delivering). Isolates are like OS processes and communicate with message passing — and as the article suggests, can fix the problem of Garbage Collection pauses by splitting up the heap (sounds like Erlang). There's more, mostly about features that remove some dynamic behavior in order to make startup and code analysis easier. Maybe Dart is worth a second look?"
Re:What? (Score:4, Informative)
I just tried Hello World in Groovy and it took almost a whole second (measured with time: 0,7s avg, 0.952s max, 0.668s min) for it to run on my MacBookPro (latest high end 17" model, not ssd).
Perl did it in about 0.007s average (0.011s max, 0.003s min), Python in 0.020s average (0.023s max, 0.017s min).
So in practice it takes a 100 times longer to load with no libraries included, it get worse if you do have dependencies.
Not an issue for a server/deamon app, a real big deal if you need to write a command line tool.