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by skybrian 3276 days ago
Yes, very much so; a fairly large team at Google is devoted to maintaining it.

I'm curious why people keep asking this? Github is very active - many commits per day. There are multiple releases per year. Flutter (which uses Dart) got a fair amount of attention at Google I/O. Where do you look to decide on project activity?
2 comments
paulddraper 3276 days ago
> I'm curious why people keep asking this?

I think this is pretty obvious. Dart was created to be an VM-optimizable language for the web.

I attended talks by it's creators in the early days, and this was the majority of the conversation.

Then other browsers refused to implement it and even stable Chrome never included DartVM, and the project announced it was giving up on that goal.

So with the raison d'etre gone, people wonder if the new language is still used. If infinite RAM had been invented three years ago, people would be asking the same question about Rust today, despite the fact that the language has more to offer than low-overhead maintainable memory management.

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skybrian 3276 days ago
Okay, thanks!

I was thinking that the decision not to ship with Chrome was very old news, but actually it was just two years ago [1]. Time flies!

Dart for the web is purely a compile-to-JavaScript language now. The last bit will be replacing Dartium with DDC [2].

The Dart VM is still around. It's used in Dart's command-line tools and in Flutter. Also, the Sass compiler is moving from Ruby to Dart. [3]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/25/google-will-not-integrate-... [2] http://news.dartlang.org/2017/06/dart-124-faster-edit-refres... [3] http://sass.logdown.com/posts/1909151

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jimhefferon 3276 days ago
Sure. Some while ago I had an idea for a project and Dart sounded good. I did what I sometimes do with a tech I am thinking about trying: I checked out a few message boards a couple of times a week, and subscribed to reddit's subgroup. At least at that time there was not much activity and not long after Google cancelled the in-browser aspect. It started to seem to me that the up-talk also died away.

I, who do not know much about this thing for sure but I do know that Google will walk away from things, got the impression that is what was happening.

Not fair, maybe, but that's the answer to the question that you asked.

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