Dart should have been dead a long time ago, Flutter saved it.
It was supposed to be the successor of JavaScript, when that ended up like everyone expected, Dart was pretty much dead until Flutter appeared and started to have some initial success.
So.. Dart by itself, what does it offer for developers/industry to change? My take is: nothing.
I thought that the DX was rather poor last time I played with Dart (not Flutter). Package docs suck when it comes to describing a package’s API and types (not sure if this is the package’s fault but I was expecting Go-like docs). I expected better from a typed language.
I also didn’t have a nice time with the package manager. I had to manually create the pubspec.yml file to even start installing packages.
Maybe I missed some crucial docs, but I was rather annoyed throughout the whole experience.
Or it is an issue and why everyone is moving to compiled languages for JS tooling, like Turbopack announced yesterday as a Webpack alternative written in Rust, to join other tooling such as esbuild, SWC, and Rome.
> Dart should have been dead a long time ago, Flutter saved it.
Not that simple. The new Dart is a completely different language than what they published 2011 als an alternative browser language.
But as far as I've seen today's Dart is not really faster than TS/JS on V8; thus, the difference is primarily the different syntax, which is probably an insufficiently important argument for most users; the cross platform AOT feature is great but apparently not important enough for the majority of people.
It was supposed to be the successor of JavaScript, when that ended up like everyone expected, Dart was pretty much dead until Flutter appeared and started to have some initial success.
So.. Dart by itself, what does it offer for developers/industry to change? My take is: nothing.