Notes from July 8th language meeting

[Bob Nystrom]

Here's my notes!

JS interop and proxies

Lars tried to make a little app using JS interop. He gets warnings from dart2js because JS interop returns a proxy. The only way to get rid of the warnings is to edit the interop package itself to make it return the dynamic type.

Gilad says we don't currently have a solution for general purpose proxies, though we've discussed a couple.

The biggest problem is checked mode. If it was just static warnings, we could do an annotation or something to turn off the warning. For general purpose proxies, "implements dynamic" may be the best thing: it is a black hole that implements anything.

We will have to educate people: most of the time you want to implement some specific type and not turn them all off like this.

One thing Lars noticed when playing with JS interop: using it from the Editor doesn't report anything, but if you invoke dart2js from the command-line, warnings come out.

The type checker in the analyzer in the Editor doesn't report problems here.

Brian says earlier they had gotten lots of complaints about warnings from code that implements noSuchMethod so they put code in there to hide those warnings. They were going to tear that out to follow the spec, but heard something may be coming in spec for this, so they haven't taken it out yet. Basically, if you implement noSuchMethod, all sorts of warnings are blocked.

Gilad will send some spec language.

Unused arguments to closures and truthiness

The Angular people sent a doc suggesting some language improvements. Based on that, Kasper wrote proposal where you can invoke a closure with too many arguments. Another idea is some sort of special apply method. The question is if it's sufficient for the angular folks.

Gilad thinks a special apply is a good idea.

They also requested some sort of operator for truthiness. It isn't very composable in Lars' mind. They will discuss it with them in September when they are all in Denmark.

Cheers!

- bob