[devsquid]

I feel your sentiment. But I always thought getting browsers to adopt Dart was a crazy and impossible idea. I was actually glad when I heard they had abandoned that plan.

Flutter confuses me. Its annoying you have to use their DSL for layouts rather than HTML and what about native widgets, like WebViews or VideoPlayers?

With them drastically speeding up the Dart2JS compiler and implementing a strong typed mode, I am quite pleased with Dart's direction.

I do still fear for its future. It would be really to sad to see Dart die. The last web app I made, I was able to make the entire thing in under 90kbs, including HTML, CSS, SVGs, and JS. Dart allows me to write desktop like applications for the web with any extra overhead.

[chriswarbo]

> I feel your sentiment. But I always thought getting browsers to adopt Dart was a crazy and impossible idea. I was actually glad when I heard they had abandoned that plan.

I agree; a saner approach than adding one particular language at a time to browsers is to give browsers support/hooks which arbitrary language implementors can target, without having to perform gymnastics like compiling to JS.

It looks like WebAssembly is (at least the first step) in that direction, so Dart and others can use that as and when it matures, without creating a legacy of language-specific issues for future generations of Web implementors and archivists do deal with.

[zeveb]

> But I always thought getting browsers to adopt Dart was a crazy and impossible idea.

I don't know — browsers are already planning to adopt a non-JavaScript language (WebAssembly); it's entirely possible that maybe, just maybe they might start to support more than just the late-90s mistake which is JavaScript.

[pjmlp]

As someone that enjoys more developing native apps than web ones, I imagine Web Assembly will eventually be the revenge of plugins.

How long it will take for Canvas/WebGL + WebAssembly frameworks to appear?

[devsquid]

Eventually someones going to create a XML based layout language to use to construct views in the Canvas, we could even call it HTML ;)

I'm not a web developer either and I look forward to WASM and its potential. But I really like HTML, I've used lots of layout languages before and I think HTML is the best I've used. The only thing I find HTML to be obtuse about is complex animations.