Is Dart a script language?

[Christian Grobmeier]

Subject says all.

I have got a mail telling me Dart is not a scripting language because
it has a vm.
Well, Java has a VM too and interprets bytecode - so if you argue you
could say Java is a scripting language too.

Wikipedia does not really show more information. German wikipeda and
english one differ.

So... how is Dart actually working? Is it generating bytecode which is
interpreted or what?
Is Dart now a scripting language or not?

Cheers,
Christian

--
http://www.grobmeier.de

[Joao Pedrosa]

Hi,

Perhaps the best answer is "Dart is not quite a scripting
language." :-)

The DartVM seems to take a little while to warm up. Running a program
for a while longer can result in more speedups. The JVM popularized
that concept of "warming up." :-)

Cross-compiling to Javascript makes Dart a little less of a scripting
language, for instance. But running Dart in a DartVM does make it more
of a scripting language.

Not declaring types in Dart makes it more of a scripting language.
Declaring types makes it less of a scripting language.

Running Dart in an IDE makes it a little less of a scripting language.
Good IDE support will be provided.

Unlike other scripting languages, Dart only runs code from the main
method. Unlike other scripting languages, Dart provides great class-
based programming support.

Dart comes with many constraints to improve error reporting and reduce
mistakes by the users. Dart helps users to avoid global variables and
such pitfalls.

Dart provides seamless library namespace if you prefix when importing
them.

I hope the Dart developers won't stop there. We need more out of
it. :-)

Cheers,
Joao

[Bob Nystrom]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 11:40 AM, Christian Grobmeier <grob...@gmail.com> wrote:

Subject says all.

I have got a mail telling me Dart is not a scripting language because
it has a vm.
Well, Java has a VM too and interprets bytecode - so if you argue you
could say Java is a scripting language too.

Personally, I try not to get too tripped up by terminology and categorization. Grouping languages into things like "scripting" or "interpreted" or "compiled" hasn't been very meaningful for a language time once language implementations got more sophisticated.

 

Wikipedia does not really show more information. German wikipeda and
english one differ.

So... how is Dart actually working? Is it generating bytecode which is
interpreted or what?

There are two ways of using Dart right now:

1. The native VM takes Dart source code and compiles it directly to machine code (i.e. it JITs) on the fly.

2. Dartc and frog take Dart code and translate it to JavaScript which can be run with any modern JS engine.

There may be other ways in the future too: Rémi has started working on an implementation that runs Dart on the JVM by compiling to bytecode.

- bob

[John Messerly]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 11:40 AM, Christian Grobmeier <grob...@gmail.com> wrote:

Subject says all.

I have got a mail telling me Dart is not a scripting language because
it has a vm.
Well, Java has a VM too and interprets bytecode - so if you argue you
could say Java is a scripting language too.

Scripting languages can (and often do) call their implementations VMs. Consider:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YARV (Ruby)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PyPy (Python)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)#Internals

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot_virtual_machine (Perl6)

And of course, the various JavaScript VMs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpiderMonkey_(JavaScript_engine)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#JavaScriptCore

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chakra_(JScript_engine)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_(JavaScript_engine)

... etc ...

Cheers,

- John

[Damien Pollet]

>> Is Dart now a scripting language or not?

What's a scripting language?

--
Damien Pollet
type less, do more [ | ] http://people.untyped.org/damien.pollet