Good to be back

T Mst

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Jan 9, 2019, 4:53:03 AM1/9/19

to Dart Web Development

I was disappointed at the dropped support for a browser VM. I didn't want to debug generated Javascript. I still don't. I checked out the Javascript stack and found Vue, which looked promising. But after weeks of learning Vue.js and fighting with the tooling (webpack, node, etc), I gave up. It just wouldn't work for me.

So I checked out the Dart webdev quickstart. Let me tell you, it was so refreshing to see the build "just work" and end up with a fully-working and tooled example in a just a few minutes. I can still hardly believe how much smoother it feels.

I understand we have to work with Javascript for legacy reasons. The loss of Dartium was a disappointment. I just hope you guys appreciate what a resource Dart is and remember that when you get requests for interop w/ Javascript tools, frameworks, etc. It's junk, and bad for software developers and the world. It needs to die but at least we don't have to kill ourselves to keep it alive, right?

Marius Räsener

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Jan 9, 2019, 5:07:02 AM1/9/19

to w...@dartlang.org

Hey T Mst,

yeah I can only agree, it's really just a complete different world. Unfortunately as of now dart:html is broken for several parts and it feels that the Dart Team still thinks that "the web == AngularDart" which of course is as far away from the truth as it could be...

But, there is maybe hope, since Kevins announcement yesterday that they're working again on dart2js and hopefully with that dart:html gets refreshed too.

Anyways, take this as a hint to prototype what you're heading too as fast as possible and test it, not everything is gold that shines including Dart... (if that saying makes sense in english)

Cheers

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Bob Nystrom

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Jan 9, 2019, 1:49:37 PM1/9/19

to web

On Wed, Jan 9, 2019 at 2:07 AM Marius Räsener <m.rae...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey T Mst,

yeah I can only agree, it's really just a complete different world. Unfortunately as of now dart:html is broken for several parts and it feels that the Dart Team still thinks that "the web == AngularDart" which of course is as far away from the truth as it could be...

Right now, the majority of our users writing Dart for the web do use AngularDart, so that tends to be our primary focus. But we don't assume that will always be true and do care about non-Angular web users too. There are just only so many resources, so we prioritize improving the lives of our customers where they currently are.

But, there is maybe hope, since Kevins announcement yesterday that they're working again on dart2js and hopefully with that dart:html gets refreshed too.

We've actually been working on dart2js non-stop the entire time. :) The dart2js team has been busy for quite some time. The move to Dart 2 and the new front end is a massive change and took a lot of work. All of the benefits of that still have not fully paid off, so they will still be spending time rearchitecting parts of dart2js to take better advantage of the new type system.

Before, dart2js had to try to infer types on its own because it couldn't rely on type annotations being correct. In that global inference is a major part of what dart2js is. That inference is still important because often it can infer a more precise type than you wrote down. But we can now use the type annotations as a seed to start that process from instead of having to infer everything from scratch. But, as you can imagine, taking advantage of that is a lot of work.