Google wants you to know there is a new language on the block dubbed “Dart” – which Mountain View describes as a class-based, optionally typed platform for building web apps.
According to Google software engineer Lars Bak, Dart was designed to create a structured, yet flexible language for web programming.
As such, Dart “feels familiar and natural,” to programmers, while delivering high performance on all modern web browsers and environments – ranging from small handheld devices to servers.
“Dart targets a wide range of development scenarios: from a one-person project without much structure to a large-scale project needing formal types in the code to state programmer intent,” Bak explained in an official blog post.
“To support this wide range of projects, Dart has optional types; this means you can start coding without types and add them later as needed. We believe [it] will be great for writing large web applications.”
As Bak notes, Dart code can be executed in two different ways: either on a native virtual machine or on top of a JavaScript engine by using a compiler that translates Dart code to JavaScript.
Essentially, this means you can code a web app in Dart and have it compiled and run on any (modern) browser.
The nascent language is packaged with a set of basic libraries and tools for checking, compiling and running Dart code, all of which Google expects to evolve further over time with dev feedback.
Interested? You can check out Dart here.
