Dart in 2016: Fastest growing language at Google, 2nd fastest in TIOBE

You don&#x27;t always have to jump to the hype train! Yes, you don&#x27;t hear much about Dart here on HN, but the project is far from dead. The most important thing is that Dart works, it&#x27;s stable and production ready and it&#x27;s being used in production not only by Google but also by other companies.<p>Dart is a very refreshing change for front-end development. No fatigue! Great tooling, nice language without surprises and optional static typing.<p>On the backend you get probably the fastests dynamic language out there, maybe competing only with LuaGIT.<p>The new Flutter for high performance mobile app development looks seriously awesome. I specially love the instant live reloading.<p>Dart&#x27;s package ecosystem (pub.dartlang.org) seems healthy with constant updates and new packages.<p>I have no idea how TIOBE works, but I find weird that people accuse Google of manipulating it to promote Dart. I believe it&#x27;s the opposite, Google has done very little to promote Dart, and that&#x27;s why you don&#x27;t hear about it very often. I believe the project deserves more promotion because it&#x27;s seriously good. Give it a try one of these days!<p>EDIT: I do <i>not</i> work for Google

Looking at HN&#x27;s Who is hiring job posts there is zero interest in it. Typescript , Elm on the other hand are going up. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ryan-williams.net&#x2F;hacker-news-hiring-trends&#x2F;2017&#x2F;january.html?compare1=Dart&amp;compare2=Elm&amp;compare3=ClojureScript&amp;compare4=TypeScript" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ryan-williams.net&#x2F;hacker-news-hiring-trends&#x2F;2017&#x2F;...</a><p>Yeah, you can say HN is startup echo chamber etc.. Well StackOverflow&#x27;s job board has more mature companies and again zero interest in Dart. Here is the latest scraped data. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;aparij&#x2F;soCareers-Data&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;result&#x2F;tags&#x2F;tags-jobs2016-12-31.json" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;aparij&#x2F;soCareers-Data&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;result&#x2F;...</a>

Dev lead here for a tiny startup. I selected Dart for front and back end, sharing code between them. It has been a great experience and I don&#x27;t have many complaints. One of the designer&#x27;s goals was familiarity. I believe they definitely nailed that goal. We&#x27;ve had experienced devs contributing to the codebase in 3 days without ever seeing a line of Dart code before. And they absolutely love working with Dart. Here&#x27;s some nice features to those who aren&#x27;t familiar with the language:<p>- Class-based, object-oriented<p>- Static typing<p>- Generics<p>- Async&#x2F;await that makes your asynchronous code look like synchronous code - (avoids callback hell)<p>- Generators<p>- Future-based, non-blocking APIs<p>- Positional, named, optional parameters with default values<p>- Arrow syntax for brevity<p>- Type inference<p>- Packages facilitate modularity<p>- Named constructors<p>- Functional programming features (map, fold, reduce, where, take, forEach, etc...)<p>- Cascade operator<p>- String interpolation<p>- Implicit interfaces<p>- Mixins (Code re-use without complex inheritance hiearchies)<p>- Reflection<p>- Streams<p>- Operator overloading<p>- Metadata annotations<p>- Concurrency through Isolates<p>- SIMD<p>- Call into JavaScript code and vice&#x2F;versa<p>- Generate nice documentation with &#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F; dart comments<p>- Built-in testing facilites - pub run test<p>- Open source<p>- Open standard

And yet, I very very rarely hear anyone talking about it? I assume it&#x27;s pushed heavily internally at Google, but anecdotally it seems nigh-unused outside of Google.<p>Am I totally off?

If somebody has an interest on what&#x27;s new with Dart, I&#x27;d suggest to peek into the Dart Developer Summit 2016 videos. Previous HN link and discussion here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12838749" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12838749</a><p>TL;DR: great developer tooling, hyper-focus on web and mobile.

We are writing spa frontend for email marketing service in dart. No angular, react, just lots of plain dart. Strong analyzer mode is used and dartium is always in checked mode. Dart shined most when we created drag and drop html editor. We like using it anl if anyone wants to know why we used dart ask for details. Check our app at listshine.com

I&#x27;m more than a little skeptical of a rating scheme that puts JavaScript use at 2.85% and Assembly Language at 2.7%. Clearly JS programmers outnumber assembly programmers 1000 to 1.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tiobe.com&#x2F;tiobe-index&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tiobe.com&#x2F;tiobe-index&#x2F;</a>

Dart&#x27;s fascinating. It feels high level and object-oriented like Python, and can be used both web server- and client-side. Check it out!

So AdWords is implemented on Dart. Well, that certainly moved my understanding of the positioning of the language from the large zoo of obscure experimentations to the rare class of industrial and production ready in a single bang.<p>In the classification of computer languages, this is like a new nova burst in the night sky.

Okay so a naive and stupid question, why do I use Dart? what does it replace? does it have any frameworks other than angular? can I use it with Vue.JS (since I have spent considerable time learning Vue)<p>I tried reading their website multiple times, each of the time I was left confused as to where the language fit

Don&#x27;t want to be the jerk here. The problem with languages is that it&#x27;s not enough to be just great, feature-rich or thought-trough. At some point they must create their own ecosystem, the bigger the better. The more open, the better.<p>I see other languages which could create bigger ecosystems in less time and as a result attract more influential contributors than Dart did.<p>Just based on its specs, Dart is a wonderful language but again, this is just one part of the story.

Dart is also the 41st largest language on GitHub, growing slower than the average. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;githut.info&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;githut.info&#x2F;</a>

Soundtrap used dart to build the first webaudio&#x2F;webmidi DAW in the browser pretty impressive haven&#x27;t seen anyone build anything that complex without dart.

Year after year, I&#x27;ve never found the TIOBE index to reflect what I personally experienced in reality. By <i>far</i>.<p>But I&#x27;m not in the US. Can somebody comment about their perception on this index?

However, Dart didn&#x27;t make the list for PYPL <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pypl.github.io&#x2F;PYPL.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pypl.github.io&#x2F;PYPL.html</a><p>or the RedMonk ranking, although this is 6 months ago. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redmonk.com&#x2F;sogrady&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;20&#x2F;language-rankings-6-16&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;redmonk.com&#x2F;sogrady&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;20&#x2F;language-rankings-6-16...</a>

If you want to see an amazing demo of what can be done with Dart, look at soundtrap.com, a full DAW running on webaudio&#x2F;webmidi built with Dart.

Dart is also a first class language in Google&#x27;s new OS codenamed Fuchsia.

OK, so I started dabbling with Dart and wanted I&#x27;ve been wanting to do this for 3 years. Please bear in mind, I want to use Dart because coding in JS directly is not something I thoroughly enjoyed the last time I built a &#x27;real&#x27; Web App. This is not a critique of Dart, it&#x27;s just my recent experience ... if any of the points I make here make no sense, please correct me (I really don&#x27;t want to use JS anymore!)<p>So I start by installing the Dart SDK on my Windows PC. First surprise, I noticed they no longer package the Dart-IDE when you install Dart SDK, a minor disappointment. But I get it, the Dart team explains they want to focus on core tools and let you use any editor (Web Storm is suggested but costs $$$, and remember I&#x27;m only scouting at this point). So decided to use the plugin for Dart in Sublime Text 3. Not perfect, but it works fairly well.<p>Other surprise, Polymer seems to be fading away. What Widget framework shall I choose? I chose React for it&#x27;s one way binding which seems to make sense to a web n00b like me, since it will simplify the flow of data. The Dart team pushes Angular really hard, but I still install the Dart-react modules. Adding dependencies to a Dart project is fairly straight forward so far.<p>Using Dart-React does not bring the happy unicorns knocking at my door. Dart React does not (yet?) process JSX, which is a pretty big feature I intended to use with Dart. JSX allows you to define your components and reuse them. Oh well, no JSX, but I&#x27;ll just have to resort to coding React components in Dart (which turns out to be a bit of a mess ...)<p>Now my shiney new Dart app needs to display some huge lists of Data in tables&#x2F;grids. I could build my own, but surely some smart dev has done this before me! Found Slick Grid, but it&#x27;s for JS (the Dart port is not as performant). Dart tools mentions that there is a JS Interop &#x27;shortcut&#x27;: If a JS component has been annotated (Typescript) you can use the annotated files to generate Dart Modules!<p>So I run the tool on the annotated Slick Grid typescript files. Success! It does generate the Dart libs! Ouuups, my boiler plate Dart project does not compile anymore since adding the Slick grid modules. Dig some more, fix the compilation issues (some obscure option was missing when converting from TS to Dart).<p>We&#x27;re back on track, my project compiles but... no grid ever show up. Looks like it&#x27;s time to test the debugging features for Dart. I get Dart to generate .map files for my project. This basically allows you to debug Dart code in browser (FF for me), and the debugging begins. I can spot exactly on which line of my Dart code the grid is supposed to be instantiated, but this requires me to move through the Dart to JS interop code and try to understand why there is a JS exception thrown somewhere.<p>So, maybe for some Dart gurus out there this is simple and run of the mill stuff. I would like to hear from you. So far I still don&#x27;t have any data grids to show my huge data set ... and am still wondering if I&#x27;m going to install Typescript which seems more tightly coupled (in a good way) to JS.<p>Calling all Dart gurus, give me your thoughts on this, I want to use Dart and have it succeed.<p>Dart Noob

Don&#x27;t use Dart for web applications. It is horrible. Hard to integrate with js libraries, lacking features from js, big fat runtime and buggy. It may be good language as replacement for server side javascript, but definitely not for web apps using dart2js.

How is fastest growing defined?<p>By percentage? That is easy for niche languages with small markets. By lines of code? That is impressive.

Indeed.com has 0 Dart jobs by title and TIOBE is a joke. Given that Google uses about 4 languages routinely (Go, Java, Python &amp; Dart) this is nothing more than internal back-patting with no relevance outside the Googleplex.

If you join my religion, it will be the fastest growing with at least 100% per day!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1102&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1102&#x2F;</a>

It doesn&#x27;t show how much Rust inproved in usage compared to last year.

The absolute LAST thing the world needed in 2016 was another programming language. Google did with Dart precisely what Microsoft tried to do when they (MSFT) created a proprietary JavaScript back in 1997(ish). Big tech companies just have a lot of hubris and want to &quot;own&quot; everything they touch. Any large software company, given enough time and success, will eventually create it&#x27;s own programming language. It&#x27;s just in their nature. It&#x27;s the natural progression of market domination.<p>They COULD contribute their efforts to improving EXISTING languages (like MSFT finally did to their credit with TypeScript, building on non-Proprietary JS, which is great) but there is a seemingly irresistible allure to the thought of owning the design and molding a language to perfectly fit your own company&#x27;s desires. You never have to deal with standards, when you&#x27;re just making it up as you go along. PLUS the massive benefit of the anti-competitive foot-hold (monopolistic foot-hold) that having its own language gives to a company, is just too tempting. They cannot resist.<p>However most developers are sick of the lanuage-Thrash. 99% of it is not innovative in the slightest, but just somebody reinventing and resolving problems that have already been invented and solved countless times before. I really really hope dart dies (and GO can also go). In my opinion there are three languages that need to still exist: Java, JavaScript&#x2F;TypesScript, and C++. Those fill EVERY need, and if the innovators would ADD TO THOSE rather than starting from scratch and pushing the reset button the software world would be a MUCH better place, and so would overall software quality.