Whats your perspective of the activity around the Dart VM? Is Google actively maintaining it? As a JS dev I always wrote it off as being a non-starter, but your project has intrigued me to taking a second look at the VM. Thanks!
The Dart VM team is super active. If you are a VM geek this group[1] is a good way to follow what is going on.
Dart now targets the Web (two compilers - one for development, one for "production" - both transpiling to JS), the server (Dart server VM - fast native JIT VM), Mobile via flutter (support for AOT on iOS), and Fuchsia.
Good question - yeah, the VM is actively maintained. All of the tooling for the Dart ecosystem runs on the VM, Flutter is a Dart VM project, too.
The changelog [1] always has a few entries for the Dart VM with each version, but it's quite clear from using it daily that much more is happening. Some notable recent improvements have been asynchronous breakpoints that are integrated in IntelliJ's debugger and some optimizations for sending messages across isolates.
notable recent improvements have been asynchronous breakpoints that are integrated in IntelliJ's debugger and some optimizations for sending messages across isolates.
Where did you get that info? I haven't seen it in the changelog. Is message passing using structured cloning?
Since this is targeted a developers, it's worth looking at the intro pages of similar tools - flask and spark come to mind but there are others in the same vein. The slideshow with vague verbiage which is often not obviously related to the code being shown just doesn't make any sense.
"Compose modular maintainable code" or "Achieve the productivity of a cohesive framework" doesn't really say anything at all - you can replace that whole thing with a random code snippet and a big title that says "Aqueduct - now, more than ever!".
Thanks for the great feedback. I wondered about that as well - as you can probably tell, I'm neither a good marketer or a good web developer.
The 'cohesive framework' one made sense in my head - the ORM and the HTTP stuff work together so that errors thrown by the ORM are translated into the appropriate status codes without having to catch the exception. I can see how just reading that may make no sense.
I'll check out the webpages for both Flask and Spark and adjust accordingly. The real info for developers is at https://aqueduct.io/docs anyhow.
I have a general question about Dart and would appreciate any thoughts.
How have you found Dart as a server-side language? What's the performance like and the ease of development?
First impressions of Dart are positive. However, the server-side (interpreted) language landscape is dominated by Python, Ruby, PHP etc. Any thoughts on choosing Dart for server-side programming over these other common languages and what you think the advantages are? Many thanks.
Sure thing. As a server-side language, love it. I also do all my command-line scripting with it, too.
Async/await is implemented really well (Google hired Erik Meijer to help them build it), their threading model is excellent, and there are built-in keywords in the language for stream handling that are seriously productive [1]. Anyone that knows Java/Swift/Kotlin/ObjC is going to be productive in Dart very, very quickly.
Performance has been great, but someone else may be better qualified to answer that question. Much of the lower level socket stuff is just C/C++. I don't want to speak on something I don't fully understand, so I included an article about the Dart VM below [2].
To me, Dart differentiated itself by being more similar to compiled, C-like languages. Obviously, Django, Laravel, Rails, etc. are much more mature. Aqueduct is tested well [3], but nothing beats years of regression tests.
I am unable to read the examples on the homepage as they scroll by too fast. Could you please do both of: increase the time each example stays on screen; and disable the automatic scrolling if the user makes an effort to select a particular example either by clicking the side arrows or the selector tabs on the bottom.
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(And we'd also really love to hear any critical feedback.)
Whats your perspective of the activity around the Dart VM? Is Google actively maintaining it? As a JS dev I always wrote it off as being a non-starter, but your project has intrigued me to taking a second look at the VM. Thanks!
The Dart VM team is super active. If you are a VM geek this group[1] is a good way to follow what is going on.
Dart now targets the Web (two compilers - one for development, one for "production" - both transpiling to JS), the server (Dart server VM - fast native JIT VM), Mobile via flutter (support for AOT on iOS), and Fuchsia.
[1] https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/?fromgroups=#...
Good question - yeah, the VM is actively maintained. All of the tooling for the Dart ecosystem runs on the VM, Flutter is a Dart VM project, too.
The changelog [1] always has a few entries for the Dart VM with each version, but it's quite clear from using it daily that much more is happening. Some notable recent improvements have been asynchronous breakpoints that are integrated in IntelliJ's debugger and some optimizations for sending messages across isolates.
1: https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
Where did you get that info? I haven't seen it in the changelog. Is message passing using structured cloning?
Just through observation. Breakpoints just started to work and a pesky race condition between isolates became reproducible.
Since this is targeted a developers, it's worth looking at the intro pages of similar tools - flask and spark come to mind but there are others in the same vein. The slideshow with vague verbiage which is often not obviously related to the code being shown just doesn't make any sense.
"Compose modular maintainable code" or "Achieve the productivity of a cohesive framework" doesn't really say anything at all - you can replace that whole thing with a random code snippet and a big title that says "Aqueduct - now, more than ever!".
Thanks for the great feedback. I wondered about that as well - as you can probably tell, I'm neither a good marketer or a good web developer.
The 'cohesive framework' one made sense in my head - the ORM and the HTTP stuff work together so that errors thrown by the ORM are translated into the appropriate status codes without having to catch the exception. I can see how just reading that may make no sense.
I'll check out the webpages for both Flask and Spark and adjust accordingly. The real info for developers is at https://aqueduct.io/docs anyhow.
I have a general question about Dart and would appreciate any thoughts.
How have you found Dart as a server-side language? What's the performance like and the ease of development?
First impressions of Dart are positive. However, the server-side (interpreted) language landscape is dominated by Python, Ruby, PHP etc. Any thoughts on choosing Dart for server-side programming over these other common languages and what you think the advantages are? Many thanks.
Sure thing. As a server-side language, love it. I also do all my command-line scripting with it, too.
Async/await is implemented really well (Google hired Erik Meijer to help them build it), their threading model is excellent, and there are built-in keywords in the language for stream handling that are seriously productive [1]. Anyone that knows Java/Swift/Kotlin/ObjC is going to be productive in Dart very, very quickly.
Performance has been great, but someone else may be better qualified to answer that question. Much of the lower level socket stuff is just C/C++. I don't want to speak on something I don't fully understand, so I included an article about the Dart VM below [2].
To me, Dart differentiated itself by being more similar to compiled, C-like languages. Obviously, Django, Laravel, Rails, etc. are much more mature. Aqueduct is tested well [3], but nothing beats years of regression tests.
1: https://www.dartlang.org/articles/language/beyond-async 2: https://www.dartlang.org/articles/dart-vm/why-not-bytecode 3: https://github.com/stablekernel/aqueduct
Thank you for sharing your project.
I am unable to read the examples on the homepage as they scroll by too fast. Could you please do both of: increase the time each example stays on screen; and disable the automatic scrolling if the user makes an effort to select a particular example either by clicking the side arrows or the selector tabs on the bottom.
Thanks, good idea and will definitely do that.