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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.
So how does a company create something better than the standards? Or are you perhaps implying that standards once set are the best for ever and ever? It's not as if Google is DROPPING support for Javascript. That would be...outrageously stupid. What exactly is your problem here?
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.
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
You do know how web standards work right? It goes something like this:
1. A bunch of people come up with ideas that would be cool to have in browsers.
2. Some of them add those things to browsers.
3. After we figure out which approach works / is most acceptable to all browser makers, it becomes a standard.
For some reason it's a common belief that it works the other way around (make standard -> implement standard), but anyone know hows anything about programming can tell you why setting everything in stone and then writing the software is a terrible idea.
1. Google isn't claiming that this is the new standard. If they did, they would just drop support for Javascript
2. Insisting on a consensus before every new technological upgrade would be frustratingly slow and the whole process can be held back by one individual. That's not how technology improves.
And when you submit your new idea to the standard committee the very first thing they will ask for is demonstration of existing practice. Standards committees do not design new features. They observe existing practices and extensions and adopt them, possibly with some modification. To get something standardized you must first make it, work out the kinks, show why it's helpful, and get people to use it in practice. Only then will a standards committee consider it for the next version.
Nobody ever claimed such.
However, just because someone has reached a conclusion you don't like doesn't make them mentally deranged or a paid astroturfer. If you believe a position to be wrong, it's so much more persuasive to respond to the points one by one rather than shoo them off with personal attacks, which only serves to please those who already agreed with you.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Slashdot posts cannot be censored or filtered off the site. We don't do that here. They can't even be taken back by the author after you've pressed "submit" and believe me, I've put a few I'd like to have back. On the balance I prefer it this way, and well, as the post accepted page says, you should have thought of that before you pressed "submit".
Shill posts detract. Pointing out shill posts detract. But there's nothing to be done. There are financial interests involved, and they will spam. There are folks who want to white-knight slashdot as a forum for Truth, and I'm guilty of that now and then even though I know that's not what it's for. As a wise someone once said (and I paraphrase), "the value of a free thing approaches zero over time". The moderation system works.
Dart looks to be interesting tech. No doubt Google will look to make it an open standard that anyone can implement - even IE. And that will move us closer to the day that all apps are web apps, which cannot be anything but a good thing. It's time that the client architecture was unhooked from the application ecosystem at the network layer. In fact, it's at least 15 years past time for that. That was the goal of X Windows (not to be confused with the upstart), back in the day (onion, belt, lawn, etc).
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Little IDE support is helped by building IDEs, not coming up with a new language that has even less IDE support.
Dart doesn't do type safety by default. There have been proposals to add optional type annotations of the sort Dart _does_ have to JS... and they were shot down by certain members of the JS standards committee, last I checked. Don't recall what the stance of Google's representatives on it was, but they weren't the ones pushing it.
As far as a compile phase goes, Dart doesn't have one either unless you're cross-compiling it to JavaScript. You just load your Dart code directly in the browser, which then compiles it. That's what browsers do with JS too.
So ignoring for the moment whether these things are good or not, I don't see Dart making much of an improvement over JS here, except in the type-safety department, where Google didn't exactly try to improve JS in the first place.