Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

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Such uninformed comparisons are getting extremely tiresome and I consider to be the enemy of progress. There is nothing more that the Dart Team can do to make it anymore open - they're doing as much as is possible.

This is nothing like IE, which is actually proprietary and closed-source. In contrast, there is absolutely nothing about Dart that's proprietary. Dart is 100% open source, including patents grants, it's completely developed in the open and for the last 2 years has seen steadily progress with feedback from the public mailing list. It's actually a goal for the project that everyone is able to freely use Dart in any capacity. Lars Bak already said that after 1.0 is shipped they're going to work on getting the language standardized. There is nothing legal or technical stopping other browser vendors using Dart, any hesitations are 100% political.

Dart is finally the first real alternative where we may be able to progress beyond JavaScript, that as a core objective also compiles to first-class JavaScript, i.e. many features dismissed because it couldn't be efficiently transpiled to JS. I care about progress, the current state of web development is fragmented and broken, we need to be encouraging more initiatives like Dart that challenges the status-quo and is able to progress past the fragmented inconsistent mess we have to deal with now in trying to develop complex, rich, high-performance web apps.

The problem is that even if Dart is completely open and patent free (and I agree that there is a vast difference between Dart and ActiveX in this regard), if the other browser vendors like Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla don't pick it up, it will still be a walled garden, even if the wall is built by the others.

Also Google has shown signs of embrace, extend extinguish when it comes to essential parts of Android, which makes me a bit wary.

I would love nothing more that Dart superseding JS as the goto language (and compile target) for browser development, as it is doubtless a step forward. But there are pitalls hidden on the way there and the outcome is determined by the path we will take.

Of course hesitations are political, because the outcome will be determined by political actions of everybody involved, Google, MS, Apple and Mozilla. Technical merits alone don't guarantee a happy outcome, sadly.

Agreed, although it's not a walled garden when others are artificially putting up the wall, since they continue to enjoy the complete freedom if they ever want to take it down.

Luckily unlike other walled gardens, the quality of Dart2JS, i.e. first-class source-maps support and many benchmarks showing it even outperforms hand-crafted JS, ensures that Dart apps will continue to benefit and run in other modern browsers even without their support, where the only difference will be the start-up and runtime performance of the running code, so we end up getting it back down to technical merits.

How are Mozilla and Apple putting up a wall ? Dart maybe open source but it still a proprietary, non-standard solution where ALL the committers work for Google.

https://code.google.com/p/dart/people/list

Please re-read the parent, I've replied saying it's not a walled garden when others are choosing not to adopt it.

> Dart maybe open source but it still a proprietary, non-standard solution

You use the word 'proprietary' but I don't think it means what you think it means. It doesn't mean you have complete access to the entire source code implementation and freedom to use all of it or any of it, in anyway you see fit. It doesn't describe a project that's driven by feedback in a public mailing list, that welcomes external feedback and contributions, and it's rarely used to describe a project with a core goal for it to have no-legal-or-technical-barrier, free access, encouraging its wide-spread adoption.

By your definition most Open source projects are proprietary and non-standard, where most programming languages aren't even standardized, the difference with Dart is that it actually has the commercial backing that can justify the effort in actually getting it standardized, which it plans to do now that Dart 1.0 is shipped, just as Lars Bak announced at Google IO.

Again like many OSS projects, the Dart project has taken external contributions, but the brilliant minds that Google have brought in to work on Dart full-time are indeed being paid to do so. It's not uncommon, to accept Q/A verified external contributions but to ensure only employees have free reign and project-wide commit access. Even Dart's internal contributions still have to go through a Q/A code-review process.

Dart is quite awesome on technical grounds. One thing though. I'm not entirely sure how it combats fragmentation. For example, I also find TypeScript awesome. ECMA6 fixes most of the blind spots of JS and it's quite palatable. Heck, even Java 8 is getting in the same general sweet spot. In another neck of the woods we have iOS. So now there are 4-5 solid platforms (language + libs) with sizable corporate support to develop Web / mobile apps. Oh, and there is also pNaCl (technically awesome as well), which raises fragmentation by an order of magnitude. I find the situation bewildering. Coding in all these languages and platforms is pretty much the same, with minor syntactic variations.

Dart provides a standard way to do inheritance which means that all libraries and frameworks will be able to inherit from each other.

Web Components and polymer is a good example of the power and re-use enabled by encapsulation. The http://www.polymer-project.org goal is that you can integrate and re-use Dart web components, Angular JS components, Firefox x-tags, etc within the same web app. Which is unprecedented in the fragmented world of JS.

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