[mdasen]

I think Dart really suffered from missteps in the early days. Originally, Dart didn't seem like anything special and it kinda wasn't. It was a dynamic language where optional type hints were suggestions and it'd be run in a VM just like JS and seemed like JS with some slight differences.

It feels like Dart became a completely different language that just happens to have the same name. It's now statically typed, has AOT compilation, null safety, etc.

I think that left Dart in a weird place in terms of mindshare. A lot of people likely looked at Dart 1, didn't see a real place for it, and haven't gone back to it. Google was also highly ambivalent about Dart for a while and most of the mindshare went to Go (despite the fact that I suspect most would prefer Dart).

In the end, it feels like Dart is lacking the ecosystem that other languages have. There's so much written for JS or Python or C# by comparison and so much of Dart seems to be in order to support Flutter.

Rust somewhat occupies its own place in the universe: people who want something a lot stricter than ordinary static languages where there's still a GC and still some runtime stuff. However, I think if Dart got more momentum it could be seen as a nice alternative to Java, JS/TS, C#, Python, etc. Note: I'm not saying that Dart has no momentum, but as you note it's mainly for Flutter.

[pjmlp]

On top of that, it was AdWords team that kept Dart 1.0 alive, while Flutter made Dart 2.0 happen.

It isn't much beyond Flutter making Dart relevant, other than the folks that decided to rewrite Sass into Dart I guess (I wonder when A RIIR will happen, like most JS tooling nowadays).