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by Decabytes 22 days ago
Just want to throw the other Google language into the ring. While I would say Dart has a few more fancy language features than Go, it has an extremely strong and modern cli tool, which is a one stop shop for all your formatting, linking, and project building needs. It even grades how well your project is constructed before you publish it to pub.dev
1 comments
nylonstrung 22 days ago
What does it bring to the table that isn't achievable with Cargo?

I just feel like Dart doesn't offer enough for a fairly standard OOP lang which isn't particularly fast and doesn't have the library ecosystem or vast training data of Rust, Go etc

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Decabytes 22 days ago
> What does it bring to the table that isn't achievable with Cargo?

Speaking purely about the cli dart devtool (flutter and debugging) dart compile (More options but the big one is JavaScript transpilation) dart info (outputs diagnostic information about installed dart toolchain)

> which isn't particularly fast

Against other programming languages that are also garbage collected Dart compares favorably, though it's implementations of things typically aims for user accessibility over maximum performance. For example a Dart Isolate is much more heavy weight than a goroutine due to it's higher startup cost and additional memory per worker. The advantage is that it has its own memory, own event loop, and communicates with other isolates only by message passing, so it's much harder to mess up.

But where Dart shines for me is in two instances. The first is as a Python programmer that wants to work in a statically typed, ahead of time compiled language. Dart fits the bill here, and covers a weakness many programming languages have which is user facing GUIs. I would argue nothing comes close to Flutter when it comes to slapping together cross platform GUIS that just work. Dart is also very good on the front and backend (with more emphasis on the frontend) of web development, and can be integrated into an existing project very well through it's ability to compile into JavaScript. Typescript definitely eats Dart's lunch here, and Go more so for the backend, but very few languages can do Webdev in a way that feels natural and due to many design decisions of the past Dart is better than most. So Dart is good for packaged user facing apps.

This also makes it a strong contender as the higher level language to pair with a lower level language. You mentioned Rust, and Dart has a Flutter Rust Bridge^1 which allows you to write normal Rust code that automatically has the glue code generated. The native code interaction story gets even better through Dart's Hooks^2, Which allow you to integrate and compile or download native assets into your Dart projects directly through Darts build interface.

> doesn't have the library ecosystem or vast training data of Rust, Go etc

LLMs are better at handling niche languages than they have ever been. And the fact that Dart is not applied broadly, in the same way Python is, means you don't need a million examples to cover the most common use cases.

1. https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_rust_bridge 2. https://dart.dev/tools/hooks

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