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VIDEO
John McCutchan , after a long career spent working on the Linux kernel and being hired out as a code optimization guru, joined Google's Dart team. A curious hire until you watch Bringing SIMD to the Web via Dart , where John makes a programmer accessible explanation of why he likes Dart: performance, performance, performance.
Dart is an open-source Web programming language developed by Google . The motivation for Dart is twofold: provide a language capable of scaling up to the complex web applications that are becoming the norm. Think Gmail. And provide a single language capable of working on both the client and server. Towards those ends Dart is a complete language, full tool environment, and provides an advanced Web UI framework for building web applications at a high level of abstraction.
Why isn't JavaScript good enough? The fear is for large web apps the nature of JavaScript puts crippling limits on potential performance improvements, which will cause web apps to lose out to mobile apps. Before you scream in protest, Dart is created by the same guys who worked on V8 , so all their JavaScript experience has fed into Dart.
John’s pitch is that despite many assertions to the contrary, the web is not fast. For example, when comparing the performance of a 2D physics engine across C and the web, the web version is 20x slower than C. Java is twice as slow as C. So the browser is not fast. Dart and the new libraries it supports can close that gap, allowing for the development of high performance applications in the browser.
You may be wondering which of the gazillion web frameworks to use and Dart may just be on the edge of your radar. If so this is an excellent video to take a look at.
Why might you like Dart? Here’s John’s list:
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