> CoffeeScript is meant to be synaptic sugar on top of JS. Dart is a language with different semantics that happens to compile to JS. As such it includes a lot of runtime code. More appropriate examples would be Emscripten, Parenscript, or ClojureScript.
I think you are correct here. But there is still something very worrying about what Dart compiles into. It isn't just the amount of code, which is what most people are discussing. It's the content too.
The content of the code makes it look like much of that code will be run all the time. In other words, it isn't just some library functions that are called rarely, it is stuff that will end up being called from your inner loops. I might be wrong here, but that's what the code suggests to me.
In that respect, the Dart compiler looks different from both CoffeeScript and Emscripten. CoffeeScript by design compiles into straightforward JS, and Emscripten manages to compile into mostly-straightforward JS as well, which is why it has decent performance. But what Dart compiles into looks like it would not run very fast on most JS engines. It might run fast on Chrome, if they tune its inlining and other capabilities for Dart-like code, but I doubt that would hold anywhere else.
Again, though, I have not profiled the generated code, I just took a look at it, so I might be wrong.