[cromwellian]

If the Dart team decided to put a lot of effort into it, I bet they could get that down, but to what benefit? The average application isn't a hello world and so most of the code that isn't being pruned is likely system runtime code that most apps need.

I decided to try such an experiment with GWT recently, since the same kind of unfair microbenchmark has been used against it.

I detail how I reduced the hello world from 2205 bytes to 710 bytes here: Th3e Hello World Challenge https://plus.google.com/+RayCromwell/posts/VK8URgZiLbS

What how did I do it? By not registering any global exception handlers, or any async tasks, and arranging for the compiler to be able to optimize away the unused runtime stuff.

But how likely is it that no one wants to catch exceptions and print pretty stack traces? Or to schedule microtasks to run at the end of the event loop?

It's not a realistic test.