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Google Ports Box2D Demo To Dart
mikejuk writes with an excerpt from an article at i-programmer about a neat graphics demo written in Dart: "One of the difficulties in getting a new computer language accepted by a wider audience is that there is doubt that it is real. Is it a toy language that just proves a concept or can it do real work? In the case of Dart, which is Google's replacement for JavaScript, the development is speeding ahead at a rate that is impressive but worrying. To prove that Dart is already a language that can be used, we now have a port of the well known 2D physics engine Box2D, the one Angry Birds uses, to Dart."
Box2D has previously been ported to Javascript. Source is available at Google Code (under the Apache license). Note that you'll need Chromium to run the demos.
Note that you'll need Chromium to run the demos
As a web developer and after all the nuisance old IE's gave me and other web developers back in the day, this is really what's stupid with Chromium and Google's approach. They're mimicking the old Microsoft here - make your own "standards" and break the web by making features and sites that only work Google's browser. I seriously thought we would had been past that and the old IE's were the last browsers that didn't adhere to standards. IE9 is now fully standards compliant, and what does Google do? Oh yes, break the web AGAIN.
This isn't the only time they're introduced non-standards compliant features, either. Another example is NaCl, or Native Client, which tries to mimic Microsoft's ActiveX, and again, only works in Chrome. But with all the security headaches. It seems like Google is going out of it's way to copy all the stupid mistakes Microsoft made. I guess Google is at the same point now than Microsoft was back then - antitrust issues, breaking web standards and constant flow of news of how they're done wrong again. It's like Microsoft all again.
TechGuys is a known M$ shill. Hey look, a whole bunch of anti-Google stuff.
Will all of the housecleaning going on at Google these days, can we really trust them not to abandon this in a year to 18 months?
They're mimicking the old Microsoft here - make your own "standards" and break the web by making features and sites that only work Google's browser.
From Dart's wikipedia page:
Google will offer a cross compiler that compiles Dart to ECMAScript 3 on the fly, for compatibility with non-Dart browsers.
And, in fact, dartc already cross compiles Dart code to plain Javascript. Once it's integrated into browsers, use it or don't use it.
It's like Microsoft all again.
Right, that's a stretch. You conveniently cherry pick details here. For example, NaCl is released under a BSD license with source code readily available. Are you saying the same was true of ActiveX since it's launch?
My work here is dung.
Here we go again!
Every time I click on a news story involving Google, I'm all but positive that the first post will be:
a) Posted with a 2.5+ million UID
b) Over 100 words long, yet still posted the same minute the story goes live
c) Negative towards Google
Here we go again. Welcome back CmdrPony / InsightIn140Bytes / DCTech. Happy shilling. Hope you karma manages to hold out for more than 4 days this time.
Box2D has been ported to everything under the sun; Javascript, Actionscript, C#, Python... I'd think there would be a problem if it couldn't be ported to Dart.
The same problem that there would be with lots of people if Microsoft started suddenly introducing their own "standards" again. There's still some issues because of all that bs 10 years ago, but now it has almost gone away. There really isn't any need to broke the web again. And how to create something better? Work out a standard of it.
What a great idea! I'll hop to it right now!
Situation: there are n+1 competing standards.
My work here is dung.
The article mentions, box2d-js. The more current port is box2dweb: http://code.google.com/p/box2dweb/
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
But that xkcd is exactly what Google is doing - creating yet another standard on the pile of old ones instead of doing it together with other browser makers.
But why would anyone start to use this?
That's called a deflection. You stated a point, I rebutted your point and -- instead of acknowledging me or providing more details to contradict my point -- you deflect it into a totally unrelated topic (everything faces user adoption problems these days).
...
I'm done with you
Is this a programming language with an existing shell script interpreter style implementation, too? If so, then I might have actual use for it. Basically, that means a light-weight interpreter (light enough to use it during system boot up to run rc scripts, so not more bloated than bash in its basic form) could be named in the script like having "#!/bin/dart" on the first line, and it would execute the file however it is designed to run them. I'm not talking about using in a browser here. For extended features beyond shell script code, it should have modules (in binary .so files or in Dart) that it can load.
I'm just starting to use Lua for this kind of thing now. Lua was intended as an embedded language, but has a shell script style interpreter which is pretty much a nice example of simple embedding. If they put Dart in a browser, and implemented it cleanly in the process, then a shell script embedding should be trivial. Have they done that?
I'd be more impressed if they make Dart do all these kinds of things (including directly run in a web server) than by implementing Box2D in it. That would mean a clear separation of execution from environment, something that Javascript only partially succeeded doing. Something that Lua did succeed at, but I still want a C-like syntax class for.
Oh, and I would definitely love to have a clean integer-only typing available, something I consider a major problem with Javascript.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Box2D in all it's ports is a very basic physics engine. While it's great news, and quite awesome it's been ported, whether it is good is different to whether it is real. VB is real, but whether it is good depends on what you're using it for.
Then we'll have a Rusty Dart.
Or maybe just name the language after yourself
Am I really the only one on Slashdot who dislikes JavaScript? Every time I have to work with JS, I feel like shooting myself in the head -> Little IDE support, no type safety, no compile phase... These things make it extremely hard to work on a large application base. In fact, at work we have a custom Java -> JavaScript compiler, which makes things a lot more manageable. Most of the bugs we get in our issue tracker are related to the web interface which is still written in plain JavaScript.
I actually commend google on trying to fix this part of the web. I am not sure if this is the correct approach, but we have to start somewhere.
the development is speeding ahead at a rate that is impressive but worrying.
Worrying because...?
Advice: on VPS providers
A remark like is is modded interesting? Really?
I've been a /. user since 1996 and I'm seriously considering leaving this site. The user-interface is broken and unintelligible and the comments seem to be heading towards brain-dead.
Y
but can it deal with a concave polygon?
"Is it a toy language that just proves a concept or can it do real work?"
depends on the work at hand
Anonymous Coward is a known Google shill.
An Open Source Proprietary Solution?
THEY DIDN'T.
Browser developers IMPLEMENTED IDEAS, they passed it back to the development boards, others played around with them, discussed ideas, THEY UPDATED. Rinse and repeat. There is a reason browser prefixes exist for CSS rules that weren't completed since they have different syntax most of the time. (the same should have been done with JavaScript as well!)
The standards weren't just pulled out of someones ass for everyone to glare and and implement, they were worked on for YEARS by individuals and groups in separate project tests according to some wants and needs of other developers and contributors in a HUGE mailing list, that covers authors of web dev sites, bloggers, website owners, games developers and so on.
Only after everyone has had their say, experimented and tested out a whole host of scenarios, will it be Set In Stone for everyone to implement as Final.
Microsoft pretty much had absolutely no part in any of this development because they are cheap.
They'd rather let everyone else implement everything and just take all the glory.
The last useful things they added to the pot were embed and XHR. (Crap, deprecated. Buggy, which is why XHR2 is being worked on, in addition to the web sockets system)
More like Fart. Great name, Google.
This is enough for me not to bother clicking on the link. Web pages that say 'This page should be viewed on browser X with screen resolution y by z' is so 1990s. Moving on.
This is enough for me not to bother clicking on the link. Saying this about your web page is a risky strategy and I guess only Google can get away with this and get a subset of people to dutifully switch browsers just to see what the exciting page has on it (and possibly Apple could too).
Moving on.
Korma: Good
I would love to have a choice of what language to use when writing client side code. JavaScript gets the job done and it is far from ideal. Even Crockford recognizes that JavaScript contains many mistakes in its implementation.