Dart News & Updates

For the latest Dart news, visit our new blog at  https://medium.com/dartlang .

The Dart 2.1 release is now available. This update to Dart 2 offers smaller code size, faster type checks, better usability for type errors, and new language features to improve productivity when building user experiences. See our  Medium post  for the full announcement.

The stable release of Dart 2 is now available, including a rewrite of the Dart web platform that offers a unique combination of productivity, performance, and scalability. See our  Medium post  for the full announcement. hnpwa.dartlang.org

Unless you're a member of the Dart misc group , you may be missing Florian Loitsch's weekly newsletters, which started in July. They live in the SDK repo ( docs/newsletter ), but Florian also posts them in the misc group. These newsletters cover the Dart language and some of the core libraries. Read them to learn about existing features ("Did you know"), planned changes, and how the Dart team considers and implements changes. For example: The July 28 newsletter (the first) starts with some 1.24 language changes that you might have missed: function types and changes to void . It also talks about the unified front end , and what that means for language changes. Finally, the letter lists features in active development, such as zones that work well with strong mode, void as a type , and changes to the core libraries . The September 29 newsletter covers 1.x JSON encoding , and plans for fixed-size integers . The October 13 newsletter covers 1.x double.toString

Dart engineer John Messerly announces the launch of polymer.dart, a port of the  Polymer stack . The Web UI package will be maintained for some time, but will eventually be replaced by polymer.dart. Here is John's  original post introducing polymer.dart : Hello Dartisans, Since we started Web UI, we've had a goal to bring the latest web standards like Web Components and Model-Driven Views to Dart developers. There have been some great developments since we started: Web Components has progressed into a set of detailed specs ( Custom Elements , Shadow DOM , HTML Templates , HTML Imports ) with interest and implementation by multiple browser vendors. Model-Driven Views has new APIs ( Node.bind , TemplateElement.model ) that allow custom elements to participate in the binding system, as well as the ability to plug in custom syntax, such as the fancy_syntax package. dart:mirrors is now implemented in dart2js! Last but not least: the development of the Poly

The incomporable  Bob Nystrom  fills us in on the language design discussions taking place amongst Dart engineers. Here are his  notes from the June 10th language meeting : Here's my notes from this week's (short)  meeting : Name collisions with dart: imports [A customer recently ran into an issue where a new type appeared in dart:html whose name collided with a name they were importing from elsewhere. This broke their app.] Gilad brought up this issue. Pete's suggestion is if there's a collision between a "dart:" import and another library, the other library wins. That way, we can add stuff to "dart:" libraries without breaking people. I explained some more details here. Lars asked if there are any negative consequences from that suggestion and when it needs to be fixed. Kasper suggested we start making it a warning  [instead of an error?]  now. Ivan asked how JS handles this. Kasper said DOM names are usually

The Angular team recently announced a Dart port of the popular Angular.js framework. Large parts of Angular functionality — components like $compiler and $scope, basic directives like ngBind and ngRepeat — have already been ported over to Dart and can be used today.  Other c ritical Angular parts like Dependency Injection and Routes are being ported now.  Karma, the Angular test runner, already works with Dart. Angular team members Brad Green  and  Igor Minar  provide details in the video from the AngularJS meetup this week . The Dart-specific discussion begins at the 40 minute mark.

The incomporable  Bob Nystrom  fills us in on the language design discussions taking place amongst Dart engineers. Here are his  notes from the June 4th language meeting : Here's my notes. As usual all mistakes are my own: are boxed doubles identical? There is a bug where doubles with the same value may return false for  identical()  because they have been boxed to different objects. Lars said it's been discussed. For doubles,  identical()  should return true based on value. We don't want the language spec to have to mention boxing so that the VM is free to optimize how it wants. Gilad asked if NaN is identical to NaN? Lars says yes. It's identical but not equal. Gilad will fix the spec. change uninitialized field error to warning? Uninitialized final fields are currently an error in the language. Kasper suggests making it a warning. It seems in line with other stuff in language. It's easy to associate some value with an u

Google I/O 2013 was a breakout event for Dart. The conference featured three well attended Dart talks, a Dart code lab, and a crowded Dart booth. Seth Ladd interviews Lars Bak and Kasper Lund about the state of Dart from the floor of Moscone Center. Dart is now running twice as fast as JavaScript on certain benchmarks. The language and the core libraries are stable, and Dart expects to reach 1.0 status in a few months. Dart sessions at I/O Google I/O 2013 featured three Dart talks (videos embedded below). Web Languages and VMs: Fast Code is Always in Fashion Lars Bak and Kasper Lund dove deep into the internals of V8 and the Dart VM , explaining why the new Dart VM is needed to take the web platform to the next level. One popular part of their talk was a demo showing Dart's support for SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) processing. SIMD allows for a big performance boost. Without SIMD, their skeletal animation example supported only about 30

The incomporable Bob Nystrom fills us in on the language design discussions taking place amongst Dart engineers. Here are his notes from the May 6th language meeting : API maturity annotations Lars says Dan Grove wants a decision on annotations that denote maturity of source code. For most stuff, Lars thinks we should just annotate the whole library. The place where makes sense is dart:html. In that case, we can make an exception. I asked if this is a language question, or just a question for people at the level of the language team. Lars says Dan specifically said for the language. Everyone agreed this is a good idea for the Dart system.  [Gilad later clarified that they all also agree it is not a language issue.] Lars says everything except dart:html we'll put in the libraries.dart config file. We can show that in the Editor. [Dan later clarified was that his question was the meta-question to decide if this issue is a language issue or not.

A new Dart Editor build is available at  www.dartlang.org/editor .  This build introduces a couple of quick assist items. The first assist item lets you combine an 'if' statement with an inner 'if' statement. Place the cursor over the starting if, press cmd-1, and hit return. That converts the following code:    if (!(object is Person)) {     if (object.name.beginsWith( 'R' )) {       nextItem = object.name;     }   } to this: if (!(object is Person) && object.name.beginsWith( 'R' )) {   nextItem = object.name; } The other quick action converts  (!(item  is A )) to (item is! A)  format: Place cursor over is, press cmd-1, and hit Return to convert to to is! format Eric Clayberg  fills us in on the changes  introduced in this build: Opening type from omni box opens corresponding file. F3 works for URL in import/export directives. Search View: Show next/previous search r

Join us at Google I/O 2013 in San Francisco's Moscone Center from May 15 through 17. This year's conference features numerous events of interest to the Dart community. You can see three Dart presentations, and take part in a Dart code lab. One of the talks, by Dart creators Lars Bak and Kasper Lund, will be streamed live. And all of the talks will be available on video. If you are at I/O, be sure to stop by at the Dart booth in the Developer Sandbox on the 3rd floor of Moscone Center. You can ask questions of Dart team members who will be available on all three days at the booth, and also at the office hours area nearby. Here are some details about the talks and the code lab: Web Languages and VMs: Fast Code is Always in Fashion Lars Bak, Kasper Lund A fundamental necessity for innovation within web apps is fast execution speed. This talk will take a deep dive into the machine rooms of both V8 and the Dart VM and explain some of the reasons why a new execut

As usual,  Anders Sandholm  has kept track  what members of the Dart team have been doing recently. He shares his notes for April with us : Dart libraries: dart:io DNS lookup IPv6 support Upgrade sockets to secure sockets Access to the PID (both for current process and the spawned processes) dart2js Compiler Added support for new function subtyping rules. Reduced the amount of patching we do on native prototype objects to a single property. Improved indexing operations on native indexable types like typed data lists. Landed support for rethrow and treating throw as an expression. Reduced code size by sharing code in mixins between all classes that mix it in. Improved our simple type inferrer to produce better types. Dartium Greatly improved WebGL performance by using dart:typed_data for typed arrays. Following up with Blink impact Various bugfixes Pub Ship pub as a snapshot in the SDK Use backjumping constraint so

A new Dart Editor build is available at  www.dartlang.org/editor . Eric Clayberg  fills us in on the changes : Semantic highlighting enabled for new analysis engine. New “Convert Method to Getter” and “Convert Getter to Method” refactorings. New “Create Class” and “Create part” quick fixes. New “Import Library” quick fixes. Multiple hover text improvements. Fixed several debugger bugs related to not being able to hit breakpoints. Additional warnings and errors enabled in new analysis engine. Many general improvements and fixes to new analysis engine.         Breaking Change List: MirrorSystem.libraries uses Uri instead of library names. LibraryMirror.url changed to LibraryMirror.uri. Rename dart:typeddata to dart:typed_data. As always,view the  changelog  for the full list of changes, and to get started with the Editor see our  tutorial .