Thanks, that makes a ton of sense, smaller/better by design but equipped to handle the same kinds of problems that JavaScript does.
Is there any advantage to writing in Dart and transpiling that to JavaScript?
Is there any advantage to writing in Dart and transpiling that to JavaScript?
Their JS pipeline is really lacking as a result
The major problem is...you can't use an Isolate on web, put more simply, everything** is on the main thread unless you go to extremes of segmenting out the code you want on another thread, compile that to JS separately, then call into it from a web worker in JS that you invoke from Dart. I'm told web devs comfy with JS don't see this as a huge deal but for me with a mobile-only background, it's convoluted and fragile
They have a preview of compiling to WASM working, web apps already feel _slick_ but apparently they're seeing a 3x speedup. I don't know enough to know if this fixes the problem above, but I would put money JS staying as is and WASM will be the web story moving forward
* if i read grandparent as "what's the quality of a Dart web app?"
** there's caveats here, ex. I'm 90% sure things like network loads and image loads arent literally on the main thread, i.e. the browser implementation of the APIs flutter calls into is non-blocking. It doesn't really matter though, unless your app is so simple you either don't have custom operations that run long enough to cause significant frame drops
Ditto.
WASM needs just 1 piece to be pretty much widely generalizable, GC. Once that happens, things will get pretty exciting. Access to a platform garbage collector will allow pretty much any language imaginable ship to WASM with some pretty minimal runtime overhead.
And GC for WASM is due to hit pretty soon. I'm looking forward to the revival of Applets :D
[1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/blob/main/proposals/gc/MVP...