Google Hopes To Replace Javascript With DART

Google has brought its arm up, narrowed its focus and let Dart fly. After months of teasing, Google has finally unveiled Dart, its new programming language for building web applications, a new platform developed with simplicity, efficiency, and scalability in mind, combining powerful new language features with familiar language constructs into easy to define code.

In September, it was reported that the search giant might be working on a new programming language after a raft of new domain name registrations had been made. The registrations covered ‘DartLang‘, ‘DartLanguage‘ ‘Dart-Lang‘ and ‘GoogleDart‘ in .com, .net and .org flavours.

JavaScript is a language that owes its popularity to the fact that it is the one and only standard web scripting language that is supported in each and every browser. As web applications are becoming increasingly complicated, JavaScript’s weaknesses are becoming ever more relevant. There are already efforts to use alternative languages on the web. For example, Google’s own GWT allows one to develop web code using Java, which is then compiled to JavaScript to be run in a browser. Another language haXe can also be used to write web code that will eventually be converted to JavaScript to run in the browser. Finally CoffeeScript too compiles directly to JavaScript, while adding numerous features and a cleaner syntax. Dart has the following design goals:

• Create a structured yet flexible language for web programming.
• Make Dart feel familiar and natural to programmers and thus easy to learn.
• Ensure that Dart delivers high performance on all modern web browsers and environments ranging from small handheld devices to server-side execution.

Google says that its new language will assist developers by helping “create a structured yet flexible language for web programming, make Dart feel familiar and natural to programmers and thus easy to learn, and ensure that Dart delivers high performance on all modern web browsers and environments ranging from small handheld devices to server-side execution”.

Google notes:

This means you can write a web application in Dart and have it compiled and run on any modern browser. The Dart VM is not currently integrated in Chrome but we plan to explore this option.

The ability to execute code in either a native virtual machine (which emulates how it’d work in real-life) or a JavaScript engine means that anything can be compiled to run on current web browsers. Dart devs are also exploring the idea of cramming a virtual machine inside future versions of Chrome. Eager coders can now get their teeth into all of Google’s open source development tools by targeting the second source link below.

Google’s dartlang.org website hosts code examples and technical overviews to detail how the programming language operates, providing a small insight into a platform that the company hopes will expand in the coming months.