Working with a combination of small scripts to create large web apps is no easy task. This is why a year ago we released a technology preview of Dart, a project that includes a modern language, libraries and tools for building complex web applications. Today, after plowing through thousands of bug reports and feature requests from the web community, a new, more stable and comprehensive version of Dart is now available and ready to use.
Dart is carefully designed so that you can build your web apps without having to choose between static and dynamic languages. With Dart, you can start coding simple scripts on your own and scale seamlessly to building large apps with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. These complex apps can also be supported by a big team with a significantly reduced debugging and maintenance overhead.
With this first developer-oriented version of the Dart SDK, we’ve made several improvements and added many features:
• A faster Dart Virtual Machine that outperforms even V8 on some Octane tests.
• A new Dart to JavaScript translator that generates fast and compact output.
• An HTML library that works transparently on modern browsers.
• A library to interoperate with JavaScript code.
• An easy to use editor.
• Pub, a new package manager
• Dartium, a Chromium build with native Dart support.
• A server-side I/O library.
• A language specification describing the Dart semantics, including new features.
Over the following months, we will continue to work hard to evolve the SDK, improve Dart’s robustness and performance, and fine-tune the language while maintaining backwards compatibility.
You can download the Dart Editor from dartlang.org. It comes with a copy of the open-source SDK and Dartium. Thanks again for all your feedback - keep it coming.
Posted by Lars Bak, Software Engineer
