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by crudbug 2205 days ago
Can we design languages that target DartVM ?

I haven’t seen much documentation around DartVM.

1 comments

In theory, you can write another language frontend for the Dart VM, but it isn't being utilized a lot as I can tell.

Here's a year and a half old page describing the Dart VM's internals: https://mrale.ph/dartvm/

Also, here are two examples of different frontend add-ons for the Dart VM, although outdated: https://github.com/thosakwe/bullseye and https://github.com/jvasileff/ceylon-dart

If you check out the dev branch of bullseye, I'm currently working on a rewrite, but it's on pause for a few months while I work on an internship.
Kudos for the work!

Out of curiosity: what is the inspiration for this and what's the goal?

The inspiration is OCaml. I've used it a lot, and some of its best features, like sum types, are missing from Dart (and many mainstream languages).

As for the goal, I just want to finish it for now. I don't intend to publish packages in Bullseye, rather just to use it in projects to consume existing Dart libraries.

Have heard praises about OCaml, but never tried myself.

Good luck!