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Analysis of Google Dart

Posted by Unknown on from the google-announces-replacement-for-english dept.

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?"

5 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. can't believe they missed this one... by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Funny
    0 == false // expected
    1 == false // wtf?

    Yeah, everything except for true evaluates to false.

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    1. Re:can't believe they missed this one... by gutnor · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Clearly it doesn't actually affect the quality or the usability of the language - JS seems to be used just fine.

      That is a bit ironic talking about a language designed to replace JS because Google thinks JS is "unsalvageable".

  2. Re:What? by AndrewStephens · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Oh please,

    Java (or more correctly; its user base) has been crying out for some sort of faster startup since the mid 90s. No other problem has done more to keep Java off the desktop that the very slow startup times. If Java applets started as quickly as Flash objects manage to then we would still be seeing Java implemented on major web sites. I could never understand why Java doesn't snapshot and cache a prelinked version of a class the first time it loads, if anything the JVM is getting slower - the demo Java Applets on my website take about as long to start up in 2011 as they did in 2000 but my computer is many times faster.

    --
    sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
  3. Re:What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Xbox Live much, bro?

  4. Re:What? by MichaelSmith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au