[isoos]

Looks like alternative facts have reached the tech world too?

You can take as hard look at Google as you would like, but choosing Microsoft over Google (one for-profit company over another), while not caring how the technology, the licensing or the workflow compares is a bit hypocrite. (e.g.they are both open, and they both have rules of commits).

I'm wondering, why do you need a throwaway for such heavily invested FUD? Your other comments here are in similar tone, and I'm surprised to see such hatred without any obvious trigger. Maybe if you would come forward with your story, it would be easier to discuss it?

disclaimer: ex-Googler, worked with Dart for 4+ years, I think it is way ahead of the JS/TS stack in many regards.

[logicchains]

>I think it is way ahead of the JS/TS stack in many regards.

In what ways do you consider it ahead of Typescript? Personally as someone who's particularly fond of static type systems (Haskell and the like), Typescript's type system seems way more advanced and powerful than Dart's (union and intersection types, in particular, and non-nullable types). Map types (introduced in Typescript 2.1) also seem pretty interesting.

[isoos]

Some of my earlier notes are in this thread (it is more about the day-to-day feature I actually use and like, and less about the fine details of the type system) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13371009

Personally I don't get the hype around union types: at the point where you need to check which type you are working with, you may as well use a generic object (and maybe an assert if you are pedantic).

Intersection types may be a nice subtlety in an API, but I haven't encountered any need for it yet. Definitely not a game-changer.

I longed for non-nullable types, but as soon as Dart had the Elvis-operator (e.g. a?.b?.c evaluates null if any of them is null), it is easy to work with nulls. Also, there is a lot of talk about them (either as an annotation for the dart analyzer or as a language feature), so it may happen.

Mapped types are interesting indeed. In certain cases it really helps if you are operating with immutable objects, and mapping helps with that (although does not entirely solves it, because the underlying runtimes does allow changes to the object).

[throwawaydbfif]

I agree about union types. They can quickly result in insane variable declaration statements that are hard to understand.

I dislike nulls though, I always wish people would just use a flag or error handling when objects are undefined, instead of "hey this object is the flag and sometimes it's not actually an object!"

You'd think language designers would learn after dealing with null pointers :)

[willtim]

So Dart hasn't really incorporated any lessons from 20 years of Java, has it? Google's answer to Tony Hoare's billion-dollar mistake is... "The Elvis operator"?

[munificent]

TypeScript has some really cool type system features. Union and intersection types are fun and really handy when interacting with dynamically typed code. (If you go back through history, you'll find almost every language with union types also has a mixture of static and dynamic typing. See: Pike, Typed Racket, etc.)

Self types (the "this" in the return type) is handy.

I can see us adding some of those to Dart eventually.

Non-nullable types are great, which I've said for a very long time[1]. We are finally working to try to add them into Dart[2]. It's early still, but it looks really promising so far. It kills me that I've been saying we should do them for Dart since before TypeScript even existed and still they beat us to the punch, but hopefully we can at least catch up.

The main difference between TypeScript and Dart's type systems (and by the latter I mean strong mode[3], not the original optional type system) is that Dart's type system is actually sound.

This means a Dart compiler using strong mode can safely rely on the types being correct when it comes to dead code elimination, optimization, etc. That is not the case with TypeScript and at this point will likely never be. There is too much extant TypeScript code and JS interop is too important for TypeScript to take the jump all the way to soundness. They gain a lot of ease of adoption from soundness, but they give up some stuff too.

In addition to the above, it means they'll have a hard time hanging new language features on top of static types because the types can be wrong. With Dart, we have the ability to eventually support features like extension methods, conversions, etc. and other things which all require the types to be present and correct.

[1]: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2011/10/29/a-proposal-for-...

[2]: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/pull/28619

[3]: https://github.com/dart-archive/dev_compiler/blob/master/STR...

[fixermark]

Typescript is definitely an improvement over type-free JS, but it's still wedded to the JS type system so unfortunately, it will still let you shoot yourself in the foot in ways you might not anticipate if you have experience with other languages with a stronger type system.

For example, If you have a string-typed foo and a number-typed bar, "foo + bar" is still a valid statement in TS because they have to maintain backwards-compatibility with JS's unfortunate language design choices.

[throwawaydbfif]

Typescript and dart are completely different animals. I can leave typescript for good by compiling to js once and it's designed to output human readable code. The js it produces will be immediately usable as javascript, and I'm totally free from the semi open language that MS controls.

Dart is a different language, it has no fallback to something familiar. I don't doubt that it's many years ahead of TS in every way but it's still rather proprietary compared to TS that I can shut off at any time with minimal effort.

The openness of typescript and dart are comparable. Both being run primarily by their champion companies with code free to review and fork but with limited ability to commit changes. They both require you to sign over copyright of code committed which I don't like for my own reasons but the license is open source.

The big difference to me is that typescript offers an escape hatch and dart does not, because one is pretty much a JavaScript enhancement and the other is completely different. I hate vendor lock-in and loss of the open web in general and you will see this as a common theme to most of my more flamey(controversial) comments. The web is closing off in so many directions and as an open source developer in my free time this is of great personal concern. I don't like that hackernews and reddit can be an echo chamber and posting contrary opinions usually makes the discussion more balanced even if a lot of people don't like it.

I'm not ex google, MS, or any of the tech giants. I'm not smart or dedicated enough to work anywhere you've heard of :). Most of my comments on throwaway accounts are unpopular, that's why I don't use my normal account. I'm not some invisible super shill, hackernews knows all the accounts I use and I'm fine with that.

I've just got my own opinions and when they're controversial it's not in my best interest to comment using my normal account. It wouldn't be for anyone. It would be utterly stupid to hurt my open source projects or reputation as a developer just because somebody doesn't like my opinions. My code and my work have no opinions, and I like to keep it that way. Throwaways are my way of keeping my opinions to myself, and I don't see anything wrong with that. Separation of church and state if you will.

I'm not totally against Google or any company in general. Microsoft in particular has an extremely rocky history when it comes to open source projects. They've probably done more harm to Linux than any company in existence. If typescript and dart both had equal migration paths I would choose dart in a heartbeat. I love tsickle and the closure compiler and the fact that the angular team is using typescript. Still, I feel like my criticism of dart has some truth to it at least.

I've taken aim at Google for the past week for what they've done to the openness of Android, AMP, and dart. Am I wrong? It's hard to argue that any of Google's platforms are as open as they were a few years ago. Some of my really unpopular opinions were posted in reponse to other poster calling me FUD or a shill, and can you blame me? It's one thing to say "I disagree and this is why" but pretty rude to just say "I don't believe you because you're obviously lying or getting paid to say that". To that I say well screw you I'll post what I want without being polite at all if you're going to be so rude. I'm replying nicely to you because you genuinely asked why I used a throwaway and said that you worked with dart at Google, way more than most would admit.

Having an unpopular opinion just gets you labelled as a shill or FUD and that's a lot of the reason I use throwaways. I've actually gotten death threats before for disagreeing with people on the internet. It's hard to say I would be better off getting death threats from people that can easily find my name, occupation, and address. Look at more of my post history and you'll see that I'm probably not a shill, or a really sneaky one if you don't want to believe that.

I just bashed Intel for removing ECC support from their desktop lines a few days ago, and Facebook and Microsoft a day before that for their shittastic timeline algorithm and irrational fear of Linux taking over corporate clients respectively. A day before that I trashed PayPal for some of their recent cronyism and praised the quality of Google's Guava libraries.

In my more ancient post history I mention how much C#'s ecosystem sucks compared to java and how even open sourcing the language doesn't mean much when it only targets windows using visual studio. I bitched about the baby boomers screwing the mellenials and asked how it's possible to start a side business. I said I don't like Python because it's slow and gave people online marketing tips on how I write high ranking blog articles. I mentioned that .NET core sounds great but it's alpha quality and it sucks that I have to use the new version of Windows server to have http2 support. I talked about how WordPress is absolute shit for anything even medium traffic. Mentioned a quip about using monotonic grey codes. Brought up some arguments about montsanto and GM windblown crops. Mentioned that Uber doesn't give a fuck about their drivers and some examples of this despite their press releases saying otherwise.

I'm getting a lot of comments about how I'm some full of shit corporate mouthpiece again so I guess it's time to cycle the old throwaway again.

I'm not asking you to agree but keep in mind that some people will have opinions completely contrary to your own. Sometimes their reasoning will be logical even though you come to a different conclusion, people are just different

[isoos]

Your worries about being locked in may have been valid 2-3 years ago (1), but things have changed a lot since:

Dart has an ongoing project (Dart Developer Compiler) which has a goal, among others, to produce readable, idiomatic EcmaScript 6. That is as close to your TypeScript fallback as it can get. (2)

Somebody also demonstrated Dart to LLVM compilation is possible. The language has a decent library for parsing the Dart sources, worst case, if you are that heavily invested in your product, you could also write something that does transpile your codebase. I did try to do it on small scale and specific examples, it is actually not _that_ hard to do, if my business relied on it, it would be certainly within reach.

(1) I'm not sure if you can call it lock-in as it is entirely open source, you can fork it, build it for yourself, change it if you have special needs. The same goes for perl, php, python, go, whatever language you prefer. Yeah, most people don't do it. Why? Because most people don't need it. If you become Facebook-size, it may look better to invest in the PHP toolchain and VM than in transpilers. YMMV.

(2) From the pure technical point of view, I wouldn't call it reassuring that the default fallback platform is JavaScript for so many people (even on the server-side). It is sure depressing that we are stuck with "1" == 1 and wrong ordering of "[1, 2, 10].sort()" for as long as we fall back to JS, and TypeScript does not improve on it.

[throwawaydbfif]

I didn't know of the developer compiler, when that reaches production I won't have any real citicism of Dart.

For now Js fallback is the only realistic option for running code on the web. Even if we get native typescript or dart support tomorrow we will still need to put up with JavaScript for like 7-10 years. For this reason a readable JS fallback seems like a vital feature to me at least. It's depressing but reality for the majority of web projects.

Does dart have a pluggable compiler framework similar to Roslyn or Antlr AST's? That would make it a lot easier to write your own conversions.

One more point in Typescipt's favor though... It would be a lot easier to modify the JS VM in browsers to support native typescript than dart. In my mind it's a lot more likely to happen because of this(less work)

[munificent]

> when that reaches production I won't have any real citicism of Dart.

It's still got bugs, of course, but we have internal customers working on real projects using it on a daily basis.

I agree totally that picking a language is a huge commitment and you want to do that with an organization (company, standards committee, group of open source hackers, whatever) that you trust.

Google is a huge company and has done lots of good and bad things, so it's easy to find enough evidence to support assertions that we should or shouldn't be trusted based on whichever view you want to demonstrate.

One way I look at it is that instead of answering the absolute question "Can I trust Google to shepherd the language well?", consider the relative question "Can I trust it to shepherd the language as well or better than the maintainers of other languages I might choose?"

Assuming you've got some code to write, you have to pick some language, so the relative question is probably the pertinent one. I hope that we on the Dart team are a trustworthy pick, but different reasonable people have different comfort zones.

> Does dart have a pluggable compiler framework similar to Roslyn or Antlr AST's?

All of our stuff is open source[1], including all of our compilers and the libraries they are built on. Most of it isn't explicitly pluggable because plug-in APIs are hard and Dart in particular doesn't do dynamic loading well.

But it's all hackable, and much of it is reusable. In particular, the static analysis package[2] that we use in our IDEs also exposes a set of libraries for scanning, parsing, analyzing, etc. that you can use.

[1]: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk [2]: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/tree/master/pkg/analyzer

[isoos]

Yes, Dart has similar constructs (kernel for low-level parts, and AST and analyzer for high-level parts).

[mememachine]

Associating your real name with a controversial opinion is basically just a bad idea.

[throwawaydbfif]

Exactly. Even if you're right it won't do you any good