Dartlang had a rough start, but during its new update during the summer, it opened my eyes, and apparently MANY others as well according to http://www.i-programmer.info/news/98-languages/7857-the-astonishing-rise-of-dart.html
it also broke into the top 20 languages of 2014 in this source: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
So what do you guys think of Dart? Im hoping mainly to use it for server-side scripting and rewrite some of my nodejs apps in Dart.
I am a 20+ year senior architect with a passion for anything that brings productivity to the area of application development and Dart ranks extremely high on the scale of both client and server side web application development. I have 14 years of .NET development experience and came to love C# and all the large eco-system that was developed to support implementation of any web application came to need. Thing was that when I adopted Silverlight I was spoiled with the richness of RIA based applications but as time rolled on it became very clear that JavaScript won the web war and so I researched many years to conclude that Dart has most of what I had and is a great place to camp out for a while, contribute to the every growing developer community and such.
As for what it lacks, I'd agree with most other comments so far however I also feel that all concerns will be addressed especially the JS INTEROP concerns.
One of my main concerns is that of resultant script size. I think (but I am not 100% sure) that the advent of lazy-loading support for Dart should mitigate some of these concerns along with continued updates from the Dart team.
Otherwise, if you have not tried Dart, and you are a skilled Java or .NET developer, then you may want to test drive it as you will pick it up in an evening, and if your anything like me, you will never want to leave it!
I evaluated Node, intrigued by the idea of event-driven, non-blocking client and server side code written in one language, but I found it to be a wild ecosystem with dozens of frameworks and not enough support and guidance for them.<p>I found Dart with its promise to bring some structure and sanity to that approach, including building a language from the ground up to do away with JS's quirks, and it has delivered. I built <a href="http://woven.co" rel="nofollow">http://woven.co</a> with Dart and Polymer.<p>The biggest pain is when you'd like to use a JS lib that isn't wrapped for Dart yet. They're hard at work to make it much easier to interoperate. They're a kick ass team, great docs, first class support in WebStorm, and its future seems bright. There are issues with Polymer like SEO that are inherent in any SPA really, but there are experiments with React-like Virtual DOM diffing and others too.<p>On the server, the dart:io is powerful and Shelf looks like an awesome set of abstractions for http servers and more that I hope to play with soon.<p>Dart is treated with heavy skepticism I think often unduly, but judge it for yourself and I think you might be pleasantly surprised.
I think Dart client side development cycle is unmatched. Develop fast with Dart VM and Dartium Browser and deploy as JavaScript anywhere. Kind of a better GWT.<p>Language is good. Also they provide a lot of tools. Package manager, nice SDK, Profiler, Debugger, Code Analyzer, Formatter, Tree-Shaker and several editors. VM speed is close to JVM.. Dart is a very good server language as well. they provide nice command line support. You need to give a try and see to decide.<p>But there are places language and tools has not yet matured and community adaptation is still weak.
I use it and love it. I mainly use it for frontend stuff to replace most of the javascript. Writing code in Dart is easy, fun and PREDICTABLE.<p>It also force me to write frontend code in a more engineered way because that's how it works, which benefits myself down the road for the millions of times I revisit and update the code.<p>My only problem for Dart is that its doc is not complete and dart:js is lacking comprehensive example for complex library.<p>But all in all I enjoy Dart a lot for my frontend development.
I'm developing with Dart full-time since about 1 1/2 years and I'm just glad that I don't have to use JS anymore.
JS has still more libs ready to use but the quantity and quality of the packages available for Dart are raising fast.
I enjoy that I can use the same language client- and server-side and share a lot of code. Upcoming features will make Dart even more appealing (Appengine support, DartVM in Chrome, async/await, ...) The Dart team is always busy improving the ecosystem :-)
The fun factor in Dart is super high. It's just a joyful experience with great tools.<p>And no need for a "Dart: the good parts" book. It's all good :-)
We're not using Dart commercially currently; though we are prototyping in it as a candidate for vNext of some very large applications. To me, it seems incredibly promising. Every time I have to go back and write JS in our production apps; I seriously miss the static analysis Dart does; it's so clunky to find trivial errors at runtime in a browser that the editor should've been able to show you!<p>However; there are some frustrating holes in it though that have made our prototyping tricky; such as:<p>Serialisation; not even JSON support. Alan Knight is working on a Serialisation library; but even that is frustrating to use (it doesn't support DateTimes at all well for ex), so I'm generating having to generate serialisation code from C#.<p>No private pub server. If you want to host Dart packages internal to your company locally; you're out of luck. Although the source for pub.dartlang.org is open; it's written to only work on AppEngine; which kinda sucks.<p>We're also slightly nervous that the Dart VM <i>still</i> isn't in Chrome. I don't know what's taking so long, but this would seriously help convince others that Google is really invested in Dart.
One thing that bothers me about Dart is that the Angular.js team decided to go with their own language AtScript, even though they were quite experienced with Dart in AngularDart.<p>Do they know something about the health of Dart that we don't?
You might be insterested in quire.io [1] team's article [2] about using dart to build a large application<p>[1] <a href="http://quire.io" rel="nofollow">http://quire.io</a>
[2] <a href="http://simonpai.github.io/2014/09/03/quire-building-with-dart/" rel="nofollow">http://simonpai.github.io/2014/09/03/quire-building-with-dar...</a>