Meet Dart, the JS killer

Brief history of Dart

Unveiled at 10th October, 2011, Google's programming language was initially meant as a replacement for JavaScript. Later, in 2015, those plans were changed to allow developers to compile Dart source code to JavaScript source code via neatly named utility dart2js.

Because of Dart's native performance achieved by eg. AOT compilation there are many libraries created to introduce Dart as a backend solution.

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Dart's backend ecosystem is surprisingly capable and can be viable option as an Node.js with TypeScript or Deno alternative.

Eg. there's a HTTP library called angel and MongoDB driver mongo_dart.

Who uses Dart

There're a lot of great apps built with Dart and Flutter. There's even a list, that includes Tencent, The New York Times and more.

Why Dart

Dart is a fully object-oriented and optionally typed language that can be compiled to achieve native performance.

Dart tooling supports JIT (Just In Time) and AOT (Ahead Of Time) compilation, which means it great for both development with seamless runtime changes insertion and for portability to the end user machine.

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JIT compilation is used in hot-reload feature of Flutter, which speeds up the development a lot. We'll see about that later in the workshop.