Google Dart: A High Performance Replacement for Javascript

Dart is an open-source Web programming language that is being developed by Google.  The goal of the Dart language is provide better performance with a more modern and cleaner design than standard Javascript.  Google’s goal for the language is “to ultimately replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development on the open web platform”.  Although, Google will have a hard time convincing Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla to include the language anytime soon in their browsers.

Markus “Notch” Persson, author of the popular and complex and compute-intensive Minecraft video game, tweeted in November 2013 after the 1.0 version of the language was first released that “I love it.  Even if it doesn’t catch on, it produces pretty fast JS”.

‘Dart Flight School’, Google’s PR and training arm that sponsors events to promote the Dart language,  says on their web page that “Dart helps you build modern web apps with a new language, core libraries, and tools such as a package manager, editor, and a compiler to JavaScript. Use Angular with Dart for extra jet fuel.”

Dart 1.1, the recent release of the language was made available in January.  This version of Dart is 25 percent faster than the first release.  But it improves performance not only on the client side, but also on the server side.  On the server side, Dart now supports the handling of very large files, file copying, process signal handlers, accessing terminal information, and the  UDP networking protocol.

A new technical committee within ECMA, has been formed, TC52, to create a standard specification for the Dart language.  Anders Sandholm, Product Manager at Google, blogged that “Dart apps can be fast when compiled to JavaScript, but an embedded Dart VM enables even better performance.  We’re thrilled to have a dedicated technical committee working on Dart. We also feel confident that Ecma—the home of standards such as JavaScript, Eiffel, and C#—is the right place to help guide the evolution of the Dart language.”

Dart provides two paths for running in client browsers.  The first approach is to convert Dart code into standard Javascript before deploying to the browser.  That’s an approach similar to what’s done by other languages like CoffeeScript, Red Hat’s Ceylon and Microsoft TypeScript.  The second approach is to design and build a Dart-specific virtual machine (VM) that will run in a browser that can directly execute Dart commands without first pre-compiling the code to standard Javascript.

Lars Bak, the leader of Google’sDart  project, said that “the next step for us is to get the Dart virtual machine into Chrome… If everything pans out the way it’s predicted, with a factor of two performance boost and a factor of ten in startup-time boost, I’m pretty sure the other browsers will be enticed with what we’re doing.”