I never see Dart talked about in these contexts but just to highlight a few things.
1. Compiles to native code with a single and very reasonable sized binary on pretty much any platform.
2. Compile to WASM (coming this year) if that’s your thing.
3. Excellent concurrency support with lightweight and simple mental models
4. Variables are not nullable by default thus simplifying tedious checking in your codebase.
5. Syntactically it’s the best parts of Java and JavaScript combined without all the foot guns and verbosity.
6. Full support for both OOP and functional code styles
7. Existing interop support with C, C++, Rust, Java and JavaScript and in the future WASI.
8. Fully static / compile time metaprogramming capabilities coming this year.
9. Also have maybe one of the best teams working on it that I’ve ever seen in an open source project anywhere. They put in a stupid amount of detail and care to try and keep everything pointing in the right direction at a macro level and have really strong levels of transparency around how the language is developed https://github.com/dart-lang/language
Honestly I think it’s critically under-rated and under-used. Most of its common criticisms I see about it are many years out of date.
Combining the best parts of Java and JavaScript isn't exactly something to boast about. Dart lives and dies with the Flutter framework. Other than that it's not doing anything special. Not terrible but also not a significant improvement.
I mean you’ve taken my point, cut it in half to remove the relevant context and are now arguing against a point you’ve made up as some kind of gotcha… I don’t know what you want me to say to that.
Same with your second point. I made a big point to explicitly say I think that right now Dart is very underused and has a huge potential outside of Flutter. Quoting that back to me as though it was something I hadn’t considered is equally as confusing.
I'm with you, I think that Dart is very sensible and very underappreciated language. But he does have a point in saying that currently Dart is tied to Flutter. Google is presenting Dart as a language that you write Flutter with, not as a separate entity. I'd much prefer if Google would present Flutter as a GUI framework for Dart, but alas. Perception is everything. As much as I'd love to start my next project in Dart I probably won't because I can't be sure that Dart won't end up in Google's graveyard in next couple of years whereas I'm pretty sure that Go won't.
You say Dart is underused, but why build something new with Dart when you could do the same thing with a better language? The only reason to use it is Flutter.
Familiarity comes to mind.
Dart has developed into a nice direction with sound null-safety, extension functions, sealed classes and compilation to native&wasm. (The libaries weren't very mature when I used Dart, not sure if that changed.)
I'd pick Kotlin because I'm familiar with it, but if mdhb is familar with Dart, maybe from his work with flutter, maybe from a time where you'd mostly use Dart to compile it to js, then go for it.
Dart is a nice enough language to earn my thumbs up. (not that that would be important to anyone.)
Dart has excellent null handling[0] so I am not sure if you're perhaps talking of another language? It has had this since release 3.0, if I recall, and has been out for quite a while.
1. Compiles to native code with a single and very reasonable sized binary on pretty much any platform.
2. Compile to WASM (coming this year) if that’s your thing.
3. Excellent concurrency support with lightweight and simple mental models
4. Variables are not nullable by default thus simplifying tedious checking in your codebase.
5. Syntactically it’s the best parts of Java and JavaScript combined without all the foot guns and verbosity.
6. Full support for both OOP and functional code styles
7. Existing interop support with C, C++, Rust, Java and JavaScript and in the future WASI.
8. Fully static / compile time metaprogramming capabilities coming this year.
9. Also have maybe one of the best teams working on it that I’ve ever seen in an open source project anywhere. They put in a stupid amount of detail and care to try and keep everything pointing in the right direction at a macro level and have really strong levels of transparency around how the language is developed https://github.com/dart-lang/language
Honestly I think it’s critically under-rated and under-used. Most of its common criticisms I see about it are many years out of date.