Dart can now produce self-contained, native executables for macOS, Win and Linux | Hacker News Reader

Dart can now produce self-contained, native executables for macOS, Win and Linux

medium.com

22 pointsilluminated9 comments

Title should specify command-line apps. I thought it could produce desktop GUI apps.

Though not the point of the article, it can indeed. I have created desktop GUI apps for Mac, Linux, and Windows in Dart using Flutter. It is still experimental and under development, but here's how: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Desktop-shells

I'm practicing with Dart for the past year and have just started trying to do some desktop programming, that's how I stumbled upon the link above. Desktop is still immature with Flutter, but is being worked on and I hope it will get a faster track from the team than web support.

Can we design languages that target DartVM ?

I haven’t seen much documentation around DartVM.

In theory, you can write another language frontend for the Dart VM, but it isn't being utilized a lot as I can tell.

Here's a year and a half old page describing the Dart VM's internals: https://mrale.ph/dartvm/

Also, here are two examples of different frontend add-ons for the Dart VM, although outdated: https://github.com/thosakwe/bullseye and https://github.com/jvasileff/ceylon-dart

If you check out the dev branch of bullseye, I'm currently working on a rewrite, but it's on pause for a few months while I work on an internship.

Kudos for the work!

Out of curiosity: what is the inspiration for this and what's the goal?

The inspiration is OCaml. I've used it a lot, and some of its best features, like sum types, are missing from Dart (and many mainstream languages).

As for the goal, I just want to finish it for now. I don't intend to publish packages in Bullseye, rather just to use it in projects to consume existing Dart libraries.

Have heard praises about OCaml, but never tried myself.

Good luck!

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