Is the world in need of another language? Of the thousands in existence and the dozens in regular use, it would seem that most of the functional necessities of modern computing should be covered. In fact, so much important work on the web – the focus of computing going forward - is concentrated in a single language, JavaScript. However, this is precisely why engineers at Google have introduced a new language into the web ecosystem, Dart. What type of traction will it gain with in web application development?
Dart will feel somewhat familiar to JavaScript at first glance, but it ultimately is a bit closer to Java in both function and form. It is object oriented rather than functional and maintains static type checking. Just as Java was designed to be enough like C++ in the hopes that developers would jump ship over to Java, Dart is designed with current JavaScript developers in mind but contains important differences that are actually instrumental in giving it an advantage over JavaScript.
The name of the game here is speed. As flexible and powerful as JavaScript is for web development, it was not designed to take on the performance responsibilities that it is currently facing. Nor is it fully designed around the scalability needs that will become essential for the web applications of the near future, despite the optimization that has gone into it over the last decade. Interestingly enough, Dart currently compiles into JavaScript (though a Dart interpreter exists and should eventually find its way into Google chrome). Dart happens to compile into an equivalent millions of lines of JavaScript, to be exact.
Dart’s success on the web depends upon it demonstrating added performance for web applications. This, of course, is also heavily dependent upon the architecture choices and even vendor partnerships made by application designers. Time will tell if Dart is the web language of the future.
