Snapshots in Dartium - Aw, Snap!

[Si Robertson]

Hi guys,

I just tried running a Dart snapshot in Dartium (Chromium) and it failed to run, the Dart VM appeared to choke on the binary file. Is this a bug or is it not possible to run snapshots in a web browser?

Thanks.

[Frank Rollpin]

I apologize for resurrecting an old topic, but I wonder if this is a supported scenario? I am interested in using it mostly for performance considerations (my app works much faster in Dartium than when compiled to JS), and I don't want to ship Dart code with it.

On a similar subject, it would be awesome to be able to use Dartium similarly to Electron (Dart VM + dart.html + dart.io) for shipping desktop application. Is there a chance for that happening some day?

[Bob Nystrom]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 9:02 AM, Frank Rollpin <frank....@gmail.com> wrote:

I am interested in using it mostly for performance considerations (my app works much faster in Dartium than when compiled to JS)

Can you file an issue with some details about this?

It may be that the performance of the generated JS is slow for some solvable reason beyond just the Dart VM being faster than V8.

Is there a chance for that happening some day?

No, I don't think so.

Dartium has only ever been intended as a development tool. That has a very different set of requirements than a browser intended for real-world end users. The latter implies a ton more effort around security hardening, performance on low-end devices, and generally much higher maintenance burden. Though it would be neat, I don't think we have the capacity to take that on.

Cheers!

– bob

[Frank Rollpin]

Filed a detailed issue describing the 6x difference in performance between DartVM and JS in certain scenarios; hopefully there is a way to alleviate the problem...

https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/27196