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Comment by tsss | Hacker News Reader

Combining the best parts of Java and JavaScript isn't exactly something to boast about. Dart lives and dies with the Flutter framework. Other than that it's not doing anything special. Not terrible but also not a significant improvement.

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I mean you’ve taken my point, cut it in half to remove the relevant context and are now arguing against a point you’ve made up as some kind of gotcha… I don’t know what you want me to say to that.

Same with your second point. I made a big point to explicitly say I think that right now Dart is very underused and has a huge potential outside of Flutter. Quoting that back to me as though it was something I hadn’t considered is equally as confusing.

I'm with you, I think that Dart is very sensible and very underappreciated language. But he does have a point in saying that currently Dart is tied to Flutter. Google is presenting Dart as a language that you write Flutter with, not as a separate entity. I'd much prefer if Google would present Flutter as a GUI framework for Dart, but alas. Perception is everything. As much as I'd love to start my next project in Dart I probably won't because I can't be sure that Dart won't end up in Google's graveyard in next couple of years whereas I'm pretty sure that Go won't.

I support that. I tried Flutter a few years ago, and I liked Dart and the Flutter way of defining the UI (compared to the old xml stuff in Android).

Then I moved to Kotlin + Jetpack Compose, and I don't see the point of Dart anymore.

You say Dart is underused, but why build something new with Dart when you could do the same thing with a better language? The only reason to use it is Flutter.

Familiarity comes to mind. Dart has developed into a nice direction with sound null-safety, extension functions, sealed classes and compilation to native&wasm. (The libaries weren't very mature when I used Dart, not sure if that changed.) I'd pick Kotlin because I'm familiar with it, but if mdhb is familar with Dart, maybe from his work with flutter, maybe from a time where you'd mostly use Dart to compile it to js, then go for it. Dart is a nice enough language to earn my thumbs up. (not that that would be important to anyone.)

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