I'm on the Dart team, so I'm extremely biased here :) but I think Dart has a very bright future.<p>Many people seem to think that better performance is the main reason to choose Dart, which can be viewed in a positive or negative light, because a Chrome with the Dart VM could be great because of the performance gain, or terrible because it's bringing a "runs best in Chrome" world.<p>So I like to say that better performance is just one reason to choose Dart, but that Dart brings many benefits over other languages (not just JavaScript) and so appeals to different developers for different reasons. A few examples:<p><pre><code> * Dart is very toolable and has a great IDE experience in a number of IDEs already: IntelliJ/WebStorm, Eclipse, the Dart Editor, Sublime, etc.
* The semantics are much more sane and predictable than JavaScript: objects are closed; Dart has class-based inheritance with interfaces and mixins; type coercion is eliminated and thus predictable; arrays are real arrays, bound checked and can't have holes; 'this' is lexically bound; accessing a undefined property throws an exception rather than propagating undefined through your program; there are no top-level statements, so startup is predictable; and on and on...
* Dart's syntax combined with interfaces allow for really great libraries, and Dart's core libraries and dart:html take full advantage of that. [] is separate from property access, so Lists, Maps, and Sets have nice-to-use interfaces. There can be multiple implementations of List, Map, etc. It's possible to write delegate/wrapper/proxy classes, etc. Dart's core libraries are a joy to use.
* Static type warnings and checked mode helps developers write correct programs. Type checks really do find errors early and save users time. We see this internally.
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The syntax is much lighter weight than Java. While people claim it's Java-like just because we have types (though they're optional), that's really a nonsensical argument - Dart's more like Smalltalk :) Dart programs are massively less verbose than Java, and I cringe every time I have to write Java code even a little.<p>So we're seeing increased usage internally even though the VM isn't in Chrome yet. The other advantages are huge and have enabled teams to deliver new apps at very fast rates. They're mostly internal for now, but we'll hopefully see more externally visible apps soon. Also, we've just begun the era of server-side Dart in earnest. That's a big area for expansion that will feedback on the web usage.