[ErikCorry]

> The issue I have with Google is it's never clear to outsiders when projects are simply "experiments" that google is going to kill later.

Well if it's any comfort that's not clear to the Googlers either.

On the other hand if something is done by a startup there's also no way to know how much of a future it has. At least if it's open source then you have time to migrate to something else if Google stops investing in it. All the examples you name are Open Source.

And I don't think it's accurate to say Google did a "soft kill" on Dart. I don't recall any time when they reduced the manpower on the project, excepting perhaps the Dartino/Fletch (embedded Dart), which was explicitly labelled as tentative and experimental. These days things are going great for Dart.