Dart Summit 2015

Last week, I flew out to Google’s San Francisco office for the Dart Developer Summit. This is a quick list of my notes.

• Dart is here to stay. Google Ads is using Dart. Other customers are using it too, like Google Fiber, Google Express, and Google’s CRM product. Usage is growing.
• Dart has a great team of really smart engineers (I would guess there were over 50 at the conference.)
• Dart’s analysis engine is very flexible. The analysis is done by a server, which makes the IDE plugins very easy to create. This means IntelliJ / WebStorm can rely more on Dart’s tools, and developers don’t have to wait for their IDE to fix bugs or add features. It will just work. New IDEs could be created more easily.
• Observatory has made some great improvements and will most likely be adding features to analyze specific time windows (instead of just start / stop)
• JavaScript interoperability will be an area of focus this year. A new development compiler was announced. The compiler will output readable ES6 javascript. It is intented to be used in development and might replace Dartium as the primary way to develop web apps with Dart.
• Dart Mobile Services was announced. Dart will run on Android and iOS in Q4 of this year. Fletch is the runtime that will run Dart on iOS. Dart can already run on Android.
• Sky is an experimental way to run Dart on Android at 120Hz. It uses Dart as the language to interact with Mojo. Mojo is an effort to extract pieces of Chrome’s renderer and other things to support different types of sandboxed content (HTML, Pepper, or NaCl). Native Client is a way to run native code securely, independent of the user’s OS. Sky will have full access to native APIs. It will not use native components for performance reasons. It will be coming to iOS soon, and already works on Android. Many of the engineers are from the webkit / blink team, and will work with Chrome’s profiling tools and Dart’s Observatory. They hope to have something more complete in 6-9 months
• Server-side dart is being used by a few teams within Google, and could be increasing soon. The team is actively working to make Dart’s tools play nicely with Google’s build environment requirements.

Overall the conference was a great opportunity to ask questions and meet Google engineers. I’m more convinced each day that Dart will continue to be a first-class language for browser, server, and mobile app development.