Dart, an OpenSource language that improves Javascript

Dart is the new bet of Google for creating new, simple-to-understand and powerful programming languages. In fact, Google It has not sought to create new paradigms or milestones in this area, but rather is dedicated to creating parallel languages ​​that improve the experience of another language.

Example of this is Go, the object-oriented language that came to face C o C++ being a language with the same possibilities, new functionalities, familiar syntax and, of course, much easier to understand within what fits, of course, replacing or even replacing C is almost impossible, it is the most deeply rooted language in the world And I doubt that something like that can be done for at least 10 to 20 years.

Well, Dart comes with the desire to stand up to javascript, but with some really interesting tidbits. First of all, you have to take into account that, although javascript (from now on JS) is a language that went from being the freak of the web to the spoiled one of the house, it has its flaws and imperfections, such as an object-orientation somewhat ... "normal" for which a language with such widespread use should have .

So to the point. Dart is a programming language syntactically similar to js, but that offers first-hand characteristics that "patch up" the shortcomings of JS, such as the implementation of a very serious and complete object-oriented system, a system with inheritances and interfaces, interpolation of strings (at the Ruby, perseus, do not infarct) and a static typing ... do not be alarmed by this last feature, remember that for languages ​​of this class, static typing is more practical and allows a different order. Of course coming from languages ​​like Python (personal case) it is somewhat cumbersome to get used to static typing.

Dart comes to offer us three concrete things directly:

<º High performance on devices used for the web.

<º Usability and productivity. Dart is dynamic and easy to learn, it uses the JS nature of "no need to complicate".

<º Possibility of creating advanced tools that facilitate development.

Well, all very nice but ... How the hell do I use it?

Well, here Dart It differs from JS, since it needs virtual machines (VM) integrated into the browser to be able to function since it also intends to offer high speed implementation on the server side natively. Anyway Dart offers us some very useful tools:

<º Dart to Javascript compiler available for Chrome, Safari 5+ and Firefox 4+.

<º Virtual machines for browsers (hopefully native) soon.

<º Dartboard is a plugin for the browser from which you can write small applications in Dart.

For this reason, this is where I come in to give some personal light to the matter; I highly recommend learning Dart, not for being a fan of Google or something like that, but because it looks very high quality, because it really looks powerful and because it makes up for the lack of JS. Also, if we use the compiler Dart to JS, we can have our code Dart transformed to JS in no time and running in any browser.

The VM part is a separate class, this will allow the language to be much more powerful when compiled and not interpreted (although it is heavier) but at the same time it can present problems for the language to expand, since if special complements are needed for its execution the thing complicates its scope a lot. Although of course, yes Google pulls standard VMs, such as one for web kit there would already be several supported browsers, obviously one will come out for Gecko (the engine of Firefox) and hopefully they will release their code so that free browsers can implement these engines (which is very likely, since Dart es OpenSource).

Cool no? Of course, like everything else, we and I personally would never recommend the use of proprietary tools, much less for development, where freedom is paramount and where, in addition to being important, it is the dominant factor in this area (I don't know if you remember that at least 80% of the most popular languages ​​are open source), so it goes without saying that Dart is 100% open, since Google supports freedom on the web (something that could be disputed and even counterproductive).

Anyway, I really like the language, in fact, right now I'm starting to gut it along with Python and see what comes out. Maybe in a while I'll bring a tutorial, snippets for Gedit and obviously the implementation of this language for Gedit… I have a lot of work to do. What do you think of Dart?

Anyway if you want to start messing around and learning a bit, I recommend going straight to dartlang.org