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Analysis of Google Dart
An anonymous reader writes "Google's new language landed with a loud thud, causing lots of interesting debates about the best place to stick semicolons... An article [in InfoQ] ... looks at some of the less discussed features. Snapshots seem to bring something like Smalltalk images and allow instant startup of applications (something Java has spent the last 15 years not delivering). Isolates are like OS processes and communicate with message passing — and as the article suggests, can fix the problem of Garbage Collection pauses by splitting up the heap (sounds like Erlang). There's more, mostly about features that remove some dynamic behavior in order to make startup and code analysis easier. Maybe Dart is worth a second look?"
In a strict typing sense, an exception makes sense. Pretending that any integer is either true or false is not strict typing, it is a convenience feature mostly offered for backwards compatibility with C, so making it incompatible with C like this makes no sense at all.
I understand Java is generally no speed demon compared to native compiled code, and desktop hard drive performance has almost stood still for ten years,
If by "stood still" you mean "almost tripled for mechanical drives", then yea, sure, i suppose.
Every few days someone comes by with a new programming language claiming to be the best thing since sliced bread. Nobody every shows a scrap of proof.
Say I wanted to write ls in Java. Startup time would be very important to me. Having dived back into Java development recently the bloat is getting me down. Nobody does anything small, except on Android where Dalvik does some of the caching and optimizing instead of the normal Java runtime.
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