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Programming

Video Will Google's Dart Language Replace Javascript? (Video) 180

Posted by Roblimo from the shall-we-play-darts-or-javascripts-this-evening-at-the-pub? dept.
Video no longer available.
Seth Ladd, Google Web engineer and Chrome Developer Advocate, is today's interviewee. He's talking about Dart, which Wikipedia says is 'an open-source Web programming language developed by Google.' The Wikipedia article goes on to say Dart was unveiled at the GOTO conference in Aarhus, October 10–12, 2011, and that the goal of Dart is 'ultimately to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development on the open web platform.' A bold aim, indeed. Last month (June, 2014), InfoWorld ran an article by Paul Krill headlined, Google's Go language on the rise, but Dart is stalling. Seth Ladd, unlike Paul Krill, is obviously rah-rah about Dart -- which is as it should be, since that's his job -- and seems to think it has a growing community and a strong place in the future of Web programming. For more about Dart, scroll down to watch Tim Lord's video interview with Seth -- or read the transcript, if you prefer. (Alternate Video Link)

Tim: Seth, what is so awesome about Dart? Seth Ladd: Well, thanks for asking. Dart is a really productive language that runs on the client and the server. It’s open source, it’s from Google and you can use it today. If you’re familiar with Java and JavaScript, it’s a great middle ground of structured programming and dynamic programming. And if you’re familiar with a wide variety languages you can get started about in an hour. It’s all open source and you can download it for free. Tim: Open source can mean a lot of things, can you talk about licensing, what is Dart about? What does it take to download and use it? And what if you want to extend it? Seth Ladd: Dart is under the BSD License. We’re hosted on Google Code. So you can just download it anytime, you get the source, you can get our binary packages. To get started, we have a holistic package with the editor our SDK and the program we call Dartium which is a build of Chromium with the Dart VM. That gives you real fantastic developer productivity because you can write Dart code and just hit reload in that development browser. Just the same productivity you have with JavaScript yet you get to use a language that has classes, libraries, types, and great new features like method cascades which is new to web programming and other nice features. Tim: Like a lot of other languages, Dart can be compiled into JavaScript. Can you help us understand how it is that it differs and how is that it is in its own language—why isn’t it JavaScript, why isn’t it Coffeescript? What makes it such a different kind of language? Seth Ladd: Sure yes. Dart is its own language with its own semantics. We looked at popular languages out there, and took some cues and inspiration and we have a Dart to JS compiler. Now that compiler doesn’t just translate into JavaScript, but it actually compiles. So we have real compiler engineers building a complier that says, “Okay, I’m going to inline this, I’m going to move this code around” instead of optimized minified concatenated output file, much like how GCC might take your C code now put really optimized inline assembly. So as a developer you sit in Dart and you compile out essentially JavaScript as assembly. Tim: I understand that at this point with the V8 engine which is actually faster than some hand written JavaScript code? Seth Ladd: Yeah, sometimes that happens. Because we have the ability to statically analyze the entire program Dart to JS that compiler turned out Dart to JavaScript, it can look and say “Okay, I don’t need this code,” or “I can actually put this here and make that faster for you”, and now put code that’s more optimized than maybe you would write by hand. Of course you could probably do it by hand if you wanted to, but that code wouldn’t be readable by humans. So let the tools do that for you. Tim: You are a developer advocate, can you talk about what that means in relation to Dart? What kind of community is there out there that you help to write programming? Seth Ladd: Yeah, developing apps gets a really cool position. We get to interface with a wide variety of customers and communities and end users. Now being the public face for Google’s developer product services and APIs. So, any day, I could be writing docs or running a training class or interacting on forums or Stack Overflow. Specifically with Dart I’ve had the real honor to work with a new community growing up, so I worked with package authors or helped answered questions or join the mailing list and help just bootstrap this growing community. Tim: You mentioned that it is growing, it’s only been around publicly for a couple of years now, what’s the momentum like with Dart? What sort of numbers do we see? How many apps are out there? What does it take for someone to add an app to the worldwide collections of them out there? Seth Ladd: Sure, yeah, we open sourced in October in 2011. We had a 1.0 release last November. Today at Google I/O in 2014, we’re happy to talk about a sneak preview of Dart as a service side application running in app engine as a custom run-time. We’ve also talked about Adwords frontend a large and important application to Google starting to transition to write into Dart. We also talked about how you can use the new polymer elements that you saw in the beautiful new material elements, you can also use those in Dart as well. Tim: The release schedule for Dart seems to be pretty aggressive Seth Ladd: Yes. Tim: You have had incremental numbers coming out pretty fast. Seth Ladd: That’s right. Tim: You said once a month releases? Seth Ladd: Well, Dart comes from Chrome, and we know that successful open source projects release early and release often. You want to get that feedback and just roll it into average release cycle. You don’t want to give end-users too long of a wait there. And so Dart said “If that worked great for Chrome, let’s do the same thing.” So we’re on a six-week release cycle, and we just have a train, we have a developer channel and we get early feedback from early adopters. They found the bugs. We fix them and push them out for the next release. And that auto updates, so every six weeks we get to push out the new awesome. Tim: Speaking of both development and Chrome, I wonder if you could just take a minute and talk about the new development environment that’s coming up with Chrome? Seth Ladd: Yeah, the other thing that we talked about here was Chrome Dev Editor—that’s a great example what you can build on the Chrome platform. The Chrome platform of course is the open web platform they HTML5 APIs, but also Chrome Apps which extend that and give you access to things like Serial or Bluetooth and some of the more hardware capabilities. With the programming power of Dart and the modularity of Polymer and the capability of the Chrome Apps, we’ve challenged ourselves to build a great editing experience. So today you can go to the Chrome WebStore and download the Chrome Dev Editor and see an example of what that Chrome platform is all about. Tim: So one final question: Who do you see using Dart either ideally or realistically right now? Is it a good language for students to pick up, as they go into education in general? Is it a good language for Javascript developers for instance? What is the ideal... that Dart programmer need to be? Seth Ladd: Yeah. Well, early this year, we ran a global series of hackathons around the world with our Google developer group communities. And the ones that I personally attended and the feedback that I heard—we had high school students, college students, experienced programmers, people that came back to development after a long time—that was really great. Because one thing we made sure is that Dart was an easily approachable language. If you’re familiar with any other languages you should be able to learn it in about an hour. If you’re new to programming we have tutorials that walk you through step-by-step. Because Dart has been designed recently we’ve learned the lessons that other languages have learned. We’re able to sort of fix the problems to make things easier so we’d definitely recommend it as a first language. Tim: One last thing I should have asked before I guess, are there new features that you are excited about in upcoming builds? Seth Ladd: Well, I think the thing that’s really exciting for me is our collaboration with Polymer, and letting you build the web components with the Dart ecosystem. Web components are great new set of specs that hit the web platform that allow you to build encapsulated, custom elements, so imagine being able to extend HTML itself, and create your own elements, you can now do that with Dart and be a first-class citizen in this new world that we’re building.

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Will Google's Dart Language Replace Javascript? (Video) More

Will Google's Dart Language Replace Javascript? (Video)

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  • Here's what I think... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @03:58PM (#47419211)

    No.

  • Can we get .... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @04:00PM (#47419241)

    ... a 'Tower of Babel' icon for articles about yet another new programming language?

  • Just as soon as it does (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Google will announce the end of the project, and that we all have two months to rewrite our code into something else.

  • Unless they can magically add Dart capabilities to all the web-capable devices already out there as well as current and future competitors devices, the answer is no.

    We don't need another "This website is best viewed in browser XYZ" era.

    • Re:No (Score:5, Informative)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @04:20PM (#47419431)

      Unless they can magically add Dart capabilities to all the web-capable devices already out there as well as current and future competitors devices, the answer is no.

      There is already a source-to-source compiler. So you can write in Dart, and then convert your Dart program to Javascript. Then your server can deliver either Dart or JS depending on the client browser's capability.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If you can convert Dart to Javascript then I don't get the point of Dart.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Lained ( 1078581 )
          Simple, not causing disruption while people change the programming language (or start programming). If I had to wait for all browsers to support it, might as well not change at all. For change to happen needs to exist critical mass, Google just removed that from the equation.

        • Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @05:00PM (#47419833)

          If you can convert Dart to Javascript then I don't get the point of Dart.

          You can convert A to B, where A and B are any Turing complete computer languages. So, for instance, JavaScript can be converted to PDP-11 assembly language which can be converted to Python which can be converted to C++. The main reasons to use one language over another are performance and the ability to express the algorithm clearly. Dart is (slightly) faster than JavaScript (since fewer type conversions and symbol lookups need to be done at runtime). But the main advantages are that it has better scoping and is more strongly typed, including structures and classes. This also means it is more reliable since more problems can be detected by static analysis tools, and runtime checks can be more rigorous.

          • Both JavaScript and Dart are strongly typed. A language either is, or it is not, there is no 'more strongly typed'.
            Perhaps you mean static typed verus dynamic typed?

            As dart is compiled down to JavaScript it certainly is 'not faster' than JavaScript ....

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by BitZtream ( 692029 )

              Both JavaScript and Dart are strongly typed

              Someone has no idea what strongly typed means ...

              and by someone, I mean you.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by bbn ( 172659 )

                Nobody knows what strongly typed means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]

              • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                by Waffle Iron ( 339739 )

                You might want to look in the mirror.

                Scripting languages usually feature dynamic, strong typing. (The runtime always knows exactly what type its dealing with.)

                Most compiled languages have static, strong typing. C is somewhat of an exception, being relatively weakly typed. (It's easy to make all sorts of bizarre type casts, sometimes implicitely.)

                A few languages are very weakly typed, such as Forth.

            • Both JavaScript and Dart are strongly typed.

              Are you serious?

              As dart is compiled down to JavaScript it certainly is 'not faster' than JavaScript ....

              Dart can be translated to JavaScript. But it is intended to be directly interpreted by the browser, in which case it is 20-30% faster.

              • Sorry ... it is very unlikely that with our days super good JavaScript jit compilers you find something that is even faster.

                • Sorry ... it is very unlikely that with our days super good JavaScript jit compilers you find something that is even faster.

                  Dart is close enough to JavaScript that much of the same JIT code can be used, and the people that designed Dart include some of the same people that work on JIT. One of the design motivations for Dart was removing some of the barriers to better JIT optimization. Dart is already faster than JavaScript, on a broad range of benchmarks, so it is silly to argue that it can't happen.

                  • As long as it is only compiled to JavaScript and there is no wide adopted Dart VM in "real Browsers" it is not silly.
                    my browsers certainly don't run Dart natively, so I can only use Dart code that was compiled to JavaScript, hence it is as fast or slower than JavaScript (and yes, I'm aware of the Dart project ... only arguing about the over simplifications some people do here).

            • What you meant to say was that "even though writing your own JavaScript identical to what Dart can be translated into would execute just as quickly, I doubt the capability of the Dart compiler to find speed benefits in JavaScript that I wouldn't find."

              See optimizing C++ compiler vs. ASM arguments.

              • No, I did not meant to say that. (Especially as I don't develop in JavaScript ;D)
                I ment that I'm watching the Dart development since it was first published, and I'm not aware that google developers once made the bold claim"we translate to javaScript and our code is faster". However I may have missed that note.

            • How the hell do you have a 5 digit id and are so smegging clueless about JavaScript ?!

              * http://www.codeproject.com/Art... [codeproject.com]

              JavaScript is a **weakly** typed language else you wouldn't have hacks like this:

              var f = 3.14158
              var i = f | 0; // convert double to int

              • And how can you not understand what "weakly typed" actually does mean?
                Go google for it ...

                • Did you even read what Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has ??

                  Some programmers refer to a language as "weakly typed" if simple operations do not behave in a way that they would expect. For example, consider the following program:

                  x = "5" + 6

                  Different languages will assign a different value to 'x':

                  One language might convert 6 to a string, and concatenate the two arguments to produce the string "56" (e.g. JavaScript)

                  A Strong Typed language does NOT automatically allow type conversion / coercion / type punning.

                  • Of course it does. (... A Strong Typed language does ...)

                    The point about "strong types" is that you can make hard assumptions about the data behind the variable when you access it.

                    Type coercions are in fact a bit wild in JavaScript, but nevertheless it is strong typed. Or is there a way to crash the VM by abusing types? Certainly not ...

                    Perhaps instead of insisting that JavaScript "is not strong typed" you should read up what the opposite is: weak typed. And then compare that with javaScripts type system ..

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by znrt ( 2424692 )

            this also means it is more reliable since more problems can be detected by static analysis tools

            actually, it means you can employ unreliable programmers and think you can get away with it because your reports are green all over. odds are you won't.

            static analysis tells if code is wrong. it will never tell if code is right. it's just a tool to assist in early improvement and by no means a substitute for reviews and testing. review and testing do add reliability. static analysis doesn't. it's just convenient, but you could do perfectly without, provided you test and review.

            • review and testing do add reliability. static analysis doesn't.

              If you have 100 hours available for testing, you can use static analysis to find 90% of the bugs and spend the rest of your time on the 10% that require deeper insight. Or you can waste 90% of your time being a human compiler, manually cross-checking symbols. Which is going to result in more reliable software?

              • If you have 100 hours available for testing, you can use static analysis to find 90% of the bugs and spend the rest of your time on the 10% that require deeper insight. Or you can waste 90% of your time being a human compiler, manually cross-checking symbols. Which is going to result in more reliable software?

                That assumes that:

                • 1) Static analysis will find enough problems to save 90% of your testing time
                • 2) There is no additional cost in development time in manually handling all type conversions

                And there are a lot of reasons to believe that neither of those are true.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by znrt ( 2424692 )

                If you have 100 hours available for testing, you can use static analysis to find 90% of the bugs and spend the rest of your time on the 10% that require deeper insight. Or you can waste 90% of your time being a human compiler, manually cross-checking symbols. Which is going to result in more reliable software?

                obviously, the one where you skip static analysis and devote 100% of testing time to testing. it will be exactly 10% more reliable than both cases of your false dichotomy. :-P

                besides, your perspective is more about productivity than about quality. that's ok, but it depends on your particular environment. actually static analysis gives you a specific insight into a code body which is good. but it's often greatly overrated and i find statements like "static analysis adds reliability" alarming. that's simply n

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jb_nizet ( 98713 )
          If you can convert C to assembler, I don't get the point of C. If you can convert assembler to machine code, I don't get the point of assembler. The point of Dart is to provide a better, more productive, safer way to develop code. And frankly, I have not written any line of Dart, but JavaScript is so badly designed that it really needs a replacement.

          • I think you're going to be a bit disappointed. Dart isn't a brand new language, its more like "better javascript". You might as well go Microsoft, and use their Typescript.

            In both cases its like more lipstick, same pig.

          • If you can convert C to assembler, I don't get the point of C. If you can convert assembler to machine code, I don't get the point of assembler.

            I presume you're speaking tongue-in-cheek. Modern C compilers do a lot more than "convert" C to assembler, they heavily optimise the resulting code. The first compiler I ever ran into that produced code so tightly optimized that it did a better job over an application's life than hand-coded assembler was IBM's Pascal/VS in 1986, but more recent compilers such as gcc blow the doors off even that. So the point is that if you want code that's well-optimized at the instruction level - and stays well-optimized

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by narcc ( 412956 )

            Why do you think JavaScript is "badly designed"?

            I'll accept "I was just repeating the meme" as an answer.

          • JavaScript is so badly designed that it really needs a replacement.

            What is so bad about it?

            • Hacks like this at the top of your JS file:

              "use strict";

              Retarded automatic semicolon insertion

              No way for one JS file to include another without resorting to manipulating the DOM

              Completely broken scope

              for( var i = 0; i < 10; ++i ) {
              }
               
              i = 11; // can use i outside scope!

              Try actually reading "JavaScript: The Good Parts" sometime.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Dog-Cow ( 21281 )

                Is that actually using i outside the loop, or are you just implicitly defining i after the loop? I don't know the answer, but based on my knowledge of JS, either could be the case. The latter is not a scope issue.

                • > The latter is not a scope issue.

                  It is a *design* issue.

                  Other languages _respect_ block scope and would give you an error for trying to access a variable outside the block scope.

                  Javascript does not. Ergo, it is a retarded design.

        • If Dart performance is better than Javascript on supported browsers then some will adopt it (surpassing JS performance should be pretty easy in my opinion, Google Maps suffers badly from JS lag and I would not expect that from Google).

          If a converter allows other browsers to be supported, then hell yes!

          Adoption will probably be mostly for new projects, I'm not sure how it would work with an existing JS heavy code base (I guess not well).

          I openly admit that I'm not a web UI developer. JS is one of the reason

        • "if you can compile C to machine code, i don't get the point of C."

          understand now?

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by rubycodez ( 864176 )

            No, I think a bad car analogy would be more helpful.

            "If you can bore out the cylinders and hand fit bigger pistons and crank on the 1.4 Liter model to get a 1.6 Liter engine, why buy the 1.6L model"

        • "If you can convert C++ to Assembler, I don't get the point of C++ ..."

          So you can write your code in a nicer language, obviously.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DrXym ( 126579 )
          Well JS sucks as a language to develop in so there is a benefit in developing in something else even if it ends up being machine generated into JS. However... it would be far more useful for browsers to support a low level bitcode (e.g. LLVM) with a set of APIs that tie into the gui, web, threading, local storage etc. than another high level language. Google has something already suitable for the job - PNaCl, but it should be standardized and simplified so any browser can implement it.

          Dart could compile t

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Why bother with that? Why not work on asm.js, and make that viable? Then all browsers could run ANY language we want to throw at the browser, and vendors wouldn't be pressured to implement an entire second VM (not like JS is going away anytime soon, so it's a waste of resources).

        But no, much easier to ask everyone to adopt another unnecessary JS language and hope they can displace it somehow. And heck, it's not exactly all that much better than ES6, which they could have more or less implemented by now if t

  • atfer it does you will go to school for 2-4 years to get a piece of paper that says you know it.

    • atfer it does you will go to school for 2-4 years to get a piece of paper that says you know it.

      If you already know JavaScript, and either Java or C++, then you can learn Dart in about 20 minutes.

      • Not according to HR.

        • Not according to HR.

          We're already hiring for somebody with 5-10 years of Dart programming experience. HR says we have to.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by znrt ( 2424692 )

        If you already know JavaScript, and either Java or C++, then you can learn Dart *and write absolute crap* in about 20 minutes.

        please, folks. do get some real insight into the languages you use before doing serious stuff others will have to maintain. thank you.

        this is true in general, but regarding to javascript:
        if you come from Java, you *must* unlearn almost everything to start doing anything half decent in javascript.
        If you come from c++ not so much, but please, please ... read the manual first. javascript is *not* what you think it is.

        the problem with javascript isn't javascript, it's that 90% of people writing javascript hasn'

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Shados ( 741919 )

          I agree with you on unlearning java before doing an anything meaningful in javascript...

          However, there's only one thing worse than C#/Java dev trying to apply what they know to Javascript, and its a C++ dev trying to do the same. I've had to deal with a few, and its completely deplorable. Overengineering and premature optimization (that actually slow things down in one place), underengineering and total lack of optimization where its easy and count.... try to do classes the same way without trying to unders

        • Absolutely right, too many developers blame the tools rather than becoming better developers, we see this every couple of years: "Every language is crap, we should all move to Language X!". Then a few years later Language Y will come along to save us from the abhorrent abortion that is Language X.

          By all means work on developing a new language if you feel it genuinely will be advantageous but unless that's your fulltime commitment in your capacity of coding then you should be focusing on becoming a more prof

  • Bertridge law of headlines (Score:5, Interesting)

    by balaband ( 1286038 ) on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @04:10PM (#47419345)

    No

  • I. e., no. [wikipedia.org]
  • Dart would need to be submitted to an independent standards body and be royalty and patent free in order for any other company to even contemplate embracing it. I don't see Microsoft, Apple, or IBM handing the wheel to google to be sole dictator of the future of a critical component of web technology . Dart may be a good idea but without community support like what has happened with the HTML 5 standards group it will continue to be a proprietary browser specific language like VBScript in Internet Explorer.

  • Not that much better than javascript (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ewibble ( 1655195 ) on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @04:27PM (#47419481)

    I really wanted to use dart, I liked the fact it had types, but once I tried using it found out types where optional, and there was no way to make them required. So knowing programmers/people in general are lazy it will degenerate into no types at all. I don't mind having untyped variables as long as you are explicit about it, but dart is the other way round.

    I think the web needs a statically typed language since webs apps are growing in size, having types allows for greater readability and ease of refactoring that untyped languages just don't provide. Dart is just not it.

    • VB6 and all versions of the Office scripting language (VB6..., I'd much rather use C#) had this option. In the early 1990s.

      I hugely prefer static typing.

      And don't get me started on function redefinition in Javascript. It's more than a debugging nightmare, it is a debugging apocalypse.

  • Last time I checked (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    You needed a special IDE to write a Dart app, and it would only run in a modified version of Chromium unless you compiled it to Javascript...so I don't see any reason why it would replace Javascript. If you want your tool to catch on, you have to come out on the winning side of "useable vs technically superior".

  • There is too much momentum for what is being used today, it's almost impossible to dislodge a de facto standard.

    • it is, so there needs to be a compelling reason to get rid of javascript in favour of something else. A new language that is a bit like javascript anyway, and gets translated to javascript for most browsers anyway is really not it.

      Now, if they could get native performance standardised and included in the major browsers I think people would be interested.
      If they had a way to compile new controls into native binaries that could be dropped in a html form, maybe we'd be interested (I know,. ActiveX, but imagine

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        They should really get together with Mozilla and mix NaCl and asm.js into one useful thing, perhaps a good solid bytecode spec LLVM can target. asm.js is doing things the right way by giving browser vendors a way to ease their existing VMs into something more performant. Google is just being needlessly demanding, and it will doom NaCl.

  • Will Google's Dart Language Replace Javascript?

    No.

    Next question?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I was going to give it a try, and downloaded the Dart + IDE bundle. Then found out it needs a Java runtime engine to run the IDE. So forget it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shados ( 741919 )

      You don't need the IDE though. Sure, its nicer if you do, but when doing javascript its not rare to use Sublime or some other similar ones, if you're not using the holy war editors.

      Sublime has packages for Dart, so well...

    • Your loss.

      Much of Google's software tooling relies on a JVM.

  • Anything that can rescue me from Javascript.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      A simple solution, which I'm sure you've overlooked, would be to try learning the language.

      It's amazing how few people bother, even after using the language for years.

  • Problem: browsers only run JS, which has it's virtues and warts.
    Solution: have a plug-in scripting engine where you can use any language, and let the developers choose their set of virtues and warts.

    There is no reason why we can't develop a plugin interface, and have other languages up and working in short order. Python would be great. Just include .py file instead of .js and have that in the interpreter. With a common shared DOM object, you can keep existing JS and transition to your language of choice.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Simon ( 815 )

      1) The idea of choosing your language has already been tried. Microsoft tried it with VBScript.
      2) Plugins?!? seriously. You want to go back to a plugin world where nothing works reliably because people don't have the right plugins installed.

      If you want different languages, then compile to JS. It works today.

  • How difficult it can it be to agree on this? This way anyone can use any language they wish. It's a win-win situation for Firefox and Google and probably for Microsoft because their underperforming new platforms will get loads of new applications. I seriously don't get corporations sometimes..

  • There should be no languages for "web development", only languages for quality development, with web being application delivery mechanism. Current dichotomy leads to loss of features and quality that was taken for granted decades ago.

    I should be able to tell a webmail site to cache all e-mails locally and then have full access to attachments and instant full body search while offline. This requires multithreading, fast access to large binary files, precompilation and static typing for performance. Javascrip

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shados ( 741919 )

      Web workers, local storage, JIT is more than good enough, and there are typed arrays for anything that matters.

      Its good enough to make 3d game engines, its good enough for a mail client.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by iamacat ( 583406 )

        Wrong! Once you invoke WebGL, you are relying on GPU much more than CPU. For comparison, try plain 2D WEBP decoding in pure Javascript.

    • Developers should be able to choose a language based on the problem they are trying to solve, not how the application will be delivered to the user.

      So there should be no languages dedicated to the kinds of problems web coders have to solve? Or do you mean all languages should support web problems?

      Maybe you object to the term, and we just say development now?

      And which languages are no longer available so you can't use their features?

  • Just what the internet needs...yet another layer of crap ontop of the already overbloated steaming pile.

  • Instead of some proper mil-spec language like Jovial or Ada. And it's delayed massively due to software problems. Co-incidence?
  • They basically recreated Java language, minus all libraries already available for Java.

  • So anyone trying to replace the DOM? You know, the thing that makes my life a living hell?

    Really, Javascript is not THAT bad, sure there are numerous things that suck about it and it seems dart does fix much of that, but the DOM is the real problem. So does dart at least make interacting with the DOM less painful?

    The problem with replacing the DOM is that all browsers would need to implement the alternative solution, any attempt to make a cross-compiler for the DOM is doomed to fail (like google GWT.) I don

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