This also will provide a leverage against Oracle.
If mobile devs started to learn Objective-C en-masse just to be able to write iOS apps, they surely will learn Dart.
The VM presumably takes advantage of the slightly less dynamic nature of Dart to make more agressive optimizations than V8.
A language that does not suck? Check. Is it multi platform? Check. Can it work in other browsers if necessary? Check. Is it open source? check. Can it run in server? Check. Is it fast? Check.
Perhaps the strongest thing going for Dart is that there's a big company with resources behind it. Unfortunately, this is also the worst thing about it. Google's lack of effort to involve other browser vendors and the community at large in it's development is ultimately the reason why not many are interested, aside from whether or not the language is any good.
languages need to be created as a dictatorship and then ultimately open sourced, imo
Does it have closures and functions-as-object passing? (amazing feature of js)
Does it support prototypal inheritance? (also great)
I honestly don't know if Dart does these two, but they're pretty important to me. Does anyone know?
Edit: after a little research it looks like the answers are "Yes" and "No". I'd be willing to try it then.
A language that does not suck?
Can it run in server?
Is it fast?
Of those five, the only one that CoffeeScript doesn't emphasize is "high performance/fast startup", which basically can't be a goal for a language without its own VM or JIT.
It seems to me that focusing on adding this one emphasis to CoffeeScript would make a lot more sense than making yet another not-exactly-Java.
http://www.dartlang.org/docs/technical-overview/index.html#g...
Performance is a design goal, but it is not given as the primary goal.
Of course, a cynical observer might say that the real primary goal of Dart is to give Chrome an artificial performance advantage over competing browsers, since that will be, at the very least, an initial effect if Google succeeds in promoting its adoption.
What I haven't seen out of the Dart project, so far, is a description of what performance targets they're trying to meet, why they think that no set Javascript extensions (e.g., the "freeze" proposals for Harmony) would suffice to meet those targets, and why they think that any of this is relevant to people whose needs _are_ adequately met by Javascript as it stands.
So Google's only hope left is for Chrome to gain monopoly-level market share to simply force the remaining browsers into compliance.
I point this out because it's an important difference.
