[themihai]

How is that? As far as I can remember performance was always the main reason. The main contributor previously worked on hotspot. It was argued that javascript hit the limits on performance and you need a clean slate, especially due the low power of the mobile devices. "Batteries included" and fixing the javascript syntatic issues was presented as secondary objective. This might have been changed after the VM was dropped from the project. Dart was supposed to be a response to native apps which failed miserably. It's a well design ecosystem for sure but it can't even compete with javascript, let alone native apps.

[mswift42]

This is the original dart language announcement: http://googlecode.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/dart-language-for-s....

[themihai]

You are right. Perhaps I heard only I wanted to hear. Anyway here is a talk about performance so definitely it was marketed as a high performance language for the web too. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Performance-V8-Dart

[isoos]

The keyword you are looking for is Dartium (Chrome with Dart support compiled), and if you are benchmarking a Dart app in Dartium vs. a JS app in any of the browsers, chances are the Dartium app will be faster. The technical goal was achieved, the political support lacked.

[themihai]

Even with Dartium it didn't reach a speed close to native. I don't doubt that if more effort would be put in the VM the perf could get better but as it is now Dartium is no longer an option.

[isoos]

Dartium doesn't need to be close to native, it just needs to beat every JS engine out there; in other words: the comparison should be in the same league. Last time I've checked it did beat them.

[themihai]

Actually it needs because it was supposed to compete with the mobile/ios/native apps not with javascript. I don't think anyone was thinking to replace javascript with something only slightly better.

[isoos]

If you are really looking for mobile/native development in Dart, I'd suggest you to check out Flutter (https://flutter.io/). It can achieve 60 fps on mobile apps, which is great in my view.

But I doubt that you are really interested in any of these. I've got the impression that you only try to find a justification of not using Dart, which is fine, but looks a bit weird when you are masking political decisions as technical ones.

[themihai]

I need someone to convince me that Dart is worth the switch and that it is safe for long terms investment. Having said that I geniunely tried Dart about 2 years ago. The plan was to try it for a small/admin app and then migrate the main app to Dart as well. Unfortunately there were issues with E2E testing; if I remember there was no Karma-like framework and on top of that the app froze several times on safari mobile. So at that time it was risky and it clearly had some technical issues. Now we know that the VM won't get into Chrome and it seems the new technologies(WASM, JS upgrades) put Dart in a difficult position. Is there any reference/complex mobile webapp 100% Dart powered?