By Lars Bak, Software Engineer, Dart Team
Cross-posted on the Chromium Blog
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•Create a structured yet flexible language for web programming.
•Make Dart feel familiar and natural to programmers and thus easy to learn.
•Ensure that Dart delivers high performance on all modern web browsers and environments ranging from small handheld devices to server-side execution.
Dart targets a wide range of development scenarios: from a one-person project without much structure to a large-scale project needing formal types in the code to state programmer intent. To support this wide range of projects, Dart has optional types; this means you can start coding without types and add them later as needed. We believe Dart will be great for writing large web applications.
Dart code can be executed in two different ways: either on a native virtual machine or on top of a JavaScript engine by using a compiler that translates Dart code to JavaScript. This means you can write a web application in Dart and have it compiled and run on any modern browser. The Dart VM is not currently integrated in Chrome but we plan to explore this option.
