[vsmenon]

[ disclaimer: I work on the Dart team ]

It depends on how you run. Dart can either run in JIT mode or AOT mode. In general, when you ship a production app (e.g., for Flutter), you are using AOT - i.e., it's compiling to native machine code. In this case, there is no interpretation or compilation at runtime. We still bundle a runtime for garbage collection.

[axaxs]

Which does 'compile exe' use? Essentially here is what I see -

  $ cat a.dart
  void main() {
  print("hello world");
  }

  $ dart compile exe a.dart
  Info: Compiling with sound null safety
  Generated: /home/x/a.exe
  ~ $ strip a.exe
  ~ $ ./a.exe --version
  Dart SDK version: 2.12.0 (stable) (Thu Feb 25 19:50:53 
  2021 +0100) on "linux_x64"

If I run without --version, it prints the same thing the 'dart' command does.

[vsmenon]

Thanks - not what I'd expect, but I can repro. Bug filed here:

https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/45197

It is AOT though. If you time `dart a.dart` vs `./a.exe` (pre strip :-), the latter should be considerably faster.