Google Dart native on WebKit?

By Christian Grobmeier

It looks like Dart is going to become native on the WebKit Browser. On monday some Googlers sent message to the WebKit folks proposing to add Dart bindings to the software. Google Developer Vijay Menon said, native bindings might be preferred over “language X to javascript tools” because

its quicker without compiling to javascript
developers don’t need to use toolchains
better debugging and profiling experience

That being said he added the multi-vm changes and the dart bindings to his message.

It is planned to work on a WebKit branch, but so far not all WebKit developers seem to be fond of this plan, as Oliver Hunt said:

“As the 90s demonstrated such “features” are bad for developers, and bad for the open web.”

Of course, people are already using multiple languages in the web – they just compile to javascript. So Google still is not planning to “force” native language support for WebKit – so far it is planned to try out if it works well and create a patch which might help people who embed WebKit to run Dart natively. In other terms: it is still a long way to bring native Dart to the all the browser out there.

Follow me on Twitter :-)

http://neutronide.com/ PizzaPanther

I’d much rather see the implementation of a VM like Parrot (http://parrot.org/) or even Java in the browser. That way you could potentially script with any language you want.
Pingback: Google Dart native on WebKit? « Grobmeier on Dart, Java, Struts, PHP and more | F2E | Scoop.it
fakgogle

CoffeeScript would be a better choice. CS has already taken off and many people are already using it. I can’t say the same for dart.
Peter Ashford

The answer to the problems of web development isn’t yet another ‘one language to rule them all’. As PizzaPanther said, we need one really good shared VM so that we could target it with whatever languages or tools we want. The JVM exists now and is extremely capable. Parrot or something custom could be put in place if there were legal/religious issues with the JVM.
Phonic

Dart does have one serious advantage: that it’s much easier and to write high performance language compilers to it vs Javascript, especially with respects to static languages. But the same improvements could be achieved with Javascript by adding some flavor of type hinting, a technique that Clojure uses to run with near Java level performance on the Java VM.
fakgogle

Well, we already have the JS “VM” and many people are happy writing compilers that targets it (Including dart). All we need to have is better support for debugging. Brendan Eich talked about this a bit in one of his talks (can’t remember which), saying we could have built-in support for linking X Lang source code line to JS code line.
Erik Martino

Even if Dart in the browser fails, it is useful to have one, because debugging and development is so much easier. For deployment you would then compile to javascript.

It is up to the Google people to prove that it is actually bringing value having dart in the browser. First of all, prove that it is faster than plain javascript.
http://www.itoctopus.com itoctopus

@Peter,

I personally wish that there was one language to rule them all. Imagine the advancements that we would have experienced in case everyone was focusing on the code rather than the language.
Pingback: Talk 150: Wir freuen euch aka BGT -1 | RadioTux GNU/Linux
Pingback: Dart is on Chromium – and Dart meets Scala « Grobmeier on Dart, Java, Struts, PHP and more

Monthly updates

Google Dart native on WebKit?