[supporting]

In Memoriam, Google Dart, 201X:

A few years ago, Dart was Google’s first foray into web programming languages. Built as a “20 percent” project, Dart developers started conversations, and built web applications that had never existed before. Dart helped shape the future of the browser before people really knew what “Beyond JavaScript” was.

Over the past decade, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, ClojureScript and ES7 have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Dart's growth, we've decided to bid Dart farewell (or, "adiós"). We'll be focusing our energy and resources on making these other development platforms as amazing as possible for everyone who uses them.

We will shut down Dart within the next 3 months. Until then, there will be no impact on current Dart users, to give the programming community time to manage the transition. People can transpile their applications into JavaScript using Google Takeout (available until next year). Starting today, it will not be possible download or patch updates to existing copies of the Dart compiler.

Dart, the language, may be going away, but all of those incredible web apps that Dart users have created will live on. We are preserving an archive of the best of the bunch, which will be available online during this transitional period. If you don't want your app or name to be included in the community archive, you can remove Dart permanently from your Google account by visiting your YouTube preferences page, and clicking on "Advanced Settings". Please visit our Help Center for further details.

It's been a great few years, and we apologize to those still actively using the language. We hope people will find other programming communities to spark more projections and build even more amazing applications for the next decade and beyond.

---

(This is just in good fun ;) Likely? No. Possible? Sure seems to be.)

[rdtsc]

> TypeScript, CoffeeScript, ClojureScript and ES7 have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world.

I guess if this user claims to represent those communities, I wouldn't want to be a part of them. In any corner of the world.

[guelo]

That was funny, but the point of this announcement is that the language is (supposedly) out of Google's hands.

[leorocky]

Nay, the big companies that care a lot about these languages own them through and through. Look at Adobe's attempt at converging ActionScript and JavaScript in the abandoned ECMAScript 4th edition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript#ECMAScript.2C_4th_E...

I think Microsoft was key in killing this. With respect to Dart, Google will have the ability to control Dart's future as long as it wants to and if it somehow lost control of the ability to shape the spec it will just do its own thing anyway, just like they have with Blink and standards (directoryReader comes to mind).

[magicalist]

You have it backwards with ActionScript. ActionScript 2.0 came out of the initial years of work of ES4, and ActionScript 3.0 came out after yet more work from TC39. Both were designed to directly take what came out of the ES4 process and fold it into ActionScript (so much so that you'll recall that originally Mozilla was going to use Adobe's Tamarin ActionScript JIT compiler as a starting point for their Firefox ES4 engine[1]).

Adobe was a big proponent of many of the big features in ES4, but so were Mozilla and others on the committee. Adobe was hoping that the work in AS2 (and eventually AS3) would anticipate what was coming and that JavaScript developers would be able to easily move back and forth between the web and Flash/Flex/whatever else they had planned at the time.

Of course influence went the other way as well: Adobe's experience with the needs of ActionScript 1.0 developers were informing what was focused on in designing ES4...but that's exactly why you bring people into committees, to help guide what comes out of them.

[1] http://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/

[floitsch]

This is a personal opinion, but I was honestly surprised how nicely the standardization process is going.

I was part of the team that started Dart (right place at the right time :), and helped design the language. Obviously we have some emotional binding to the language and would like to drive it into the right direction, but most of us are perfectly happy with others taking the relay.

We still have some ideas and proposals that we have worked on and that we want to champion, but all in all I just hope that the TC52 members will do a good job.

[ternaryoperator]

Yeah, but I think the point is that ECMA standardization does not confer longevity. If Google abandons Dart, the language is no more alive or dead because it's been standardized by ECMA. The risk to Dart developers is effectively the same.