I tried dart just last week with dart IDE (1.4.3). It was good, much better than javascript.<p>My observations:
Installing dependencies was easy. Types help a lot. The IDE is good but sometimes can not show the correct type or just shows dynamic, the autocomplete is usable if you write `this.` . Usable for a modify-refresh cycle but the attached chromium seems to be a little buggy (on xubuntu the window is not correctly drawn). In-browser exceptions are a little cryptic to read. Very similar syntax to java/c#. Good stdlib (I tried async/browser/math). Little cumbersome calling JS but it works. Bult-in factory pattern, setters/getters.<p>I think they could let users create multiline functions with the => operator (currently only one line). :)<p>I tried to pub my code, but it did not work for some reasons. I haven't tried since then so I don't know what kind of js it generates.
I was at last year's Google IO and a lot of people were asking the Dart representatives about whether Dart was going to be supported in Chrome (not just Chromium). We were told the team was holding off because of performance considerations. It has been ONE WHOLE YEAR since then.
I wouldn't use Dart until this bug is fixed: <a href="https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=13285" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=13285</a>
I would like to use it but Javascript Frameworks and libraries are being developed so rapidly that it gets difficult to choose Dart and plus it is yet to mature. I may be wrong.
I too would like to see a lot more work done on Dart web frameworks (particularly client side) and a lot more documentation/tutorials demonstrating non-trivial real applications which have a complex UI, data binding, and talk to a database on the backend. Right now it's the dearth of documentation/tutorials/books holding me back as I'm on the beginner end of the spectrum--but still very interested in Dart.
Hello, golangs channels and go routines have been quite popular with some. So popular that the clojure guys created core.async and even adopted the "go" command(as a nod I'm assuming?). This works in the JVM via clojurescript.. Has the Dart team considered such a system? Was it brought up when planning the await stuff?
It would give me greater confidence if the first Dart example[1] on the official Dart website did not point to a 404 Not Found.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.dartlang.org/samples/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dartlang.org/samples/</a>
I just don't trust Google to do languages and developer tools very well. They don't seem to depend on developers enough to bend over backwards for us the way that Microsoft does.<p>Plus, they seem to want to use web tech to build native desktop tools all the time and little things like "keyboard acceleration" don't seem to matter to them because there are no standards for that in web-world.