I was testing Dart in late 2013, for the admin pages of a hobby project of mine. But switched to TS because:
- As of now, TS and JS result in faster pages for me, because with TS and JS I can use React.js instead of Angular or Angular-Dart, and render the pages server side. And TS + React is for me easier to make it run fast, also after page load.
- Dart makes the fastest browser faster (except on initial page load, see above), but other browsers slow down, because they need to download the Dart runtime. This tradeoff feels like a not-a-good-idea, at least not for the homepage and other pages that should load in an instant for new users. So I wouldn't be able to use Dart everywhere? And then I'd have to use both Dart and TS/JS = too complicated.
Minor things:
- I think I felt a bit annoyed that Dart only made warnings of things that I would have wanted to be compilation time errors.
- I like TS better, it looks a bit more like Scala with the `: Type` annotations.
- Dart didn't work well in Firefox for me, it felt like boring to try to investigate what was wrong. (This was in November 2013 perhaps.)
The things I don't like about TS, is that it takes long to compile. And that it takes a while to learn how to use it — I still don't know much about it actually. And I haven't found any good free TS editor on Linux. (I'm about to try Atom I think.)
If it's okay, I'd be interested in having a look at your Dart project? After all I spent fairly much time with Dart; it would be interesting to see what other people build with it :-)
My Dart thingy is commercial NDA bla bla bla - so the only thing I can say it's more than 20K LOC. I was always afraid that such a big app couldn't be mantained in lang without proper IDE on non-windows (for Dart I'm using Dart's team Eclipse plugin and/or Webstorm plugin).
In my case I'm just too lazy to code in lang without lexical this and as I understand JS is TS subset, so you still can shot yourself in the foot really easy, also from what I hear JS/TS is better suited for small projects whereas Dart shines when project gets bigger (tree shaking, proper SDK) and perf really matters.
On the con side: I would love Dart had as good IDE/plugin as TS has on Windows (Visual Studio).
Do you use Dart for your whole website? How about page load times for the homepage? Or do you use Dart for pages / things that won't appear until the user knows what everything is about and is interested already, and won't mind ... 200 extra ms to download the Dart runtime?
Or is it an internal in-company application?
Do you happen to know how many kb JS code gets downloaded to a browser that doesn't support Dart natively?
(Unless this is too classified :-) )
Yes weird things happens sometimes with JS... a little bit more often with JS than with TS I think because TS is more restrictive.
It's Single Page Application used mostly from customer's intranet - currently around 1.6MB uncompressed (js version) - only initial page load is painful and takes around 2.3 sec from internet (on my decent DSL). But since it's just work tool they don't care about page loads that much as they do about feature completness.
I'm using Polymer-Dart on frontned + Dropwizard on backend (these days I would use Dart on the server side too, but when I was starting it wasn't mature enough). Overall I'm pretty happy with this tech except I hoped for faster Web Components adoption (better Polymer support for non-Chrome)
Thanks for sharing. Hmm, 1.6 MB minified and gzipped that might mean something like 300-400kb, which sounds fine to me. Edit Aha you wrote uncompressed — I suppose the JS was minified already then, and then the bundle will be larger, okay.
Full stack Dart seems like a good alternative. I wonder how popular it'll become now when there's Rust, Go and Scala.js too :-)
- As of now, TS and JS result in faster pages for me, because with TS and JS I can use React.js instead of Angular or Angular-Dart, and render the pages server side. And TS + React is for me easier to make it run fast, also after page load.
- Dart makes the fastest browser faster (except on initial page load, see above), but other browsers slow down, because they need to download the Dart runtime. This tradeoff feels like a not-a-good-idea, at least not for the homepage and other pages that should load in an instant for new users. So I wouldn't be able to use Dart everywhere? And then I'd have to use both Dart and TS/JS = too complicated.
Minor things:
- I think I felt a bit annoyed that Dart only made warnings of things that I would have wanted to be compilation time errors.
- I like TS better, it looks a bit more like Scala with the `: Type` annotations.
- Dart didn't work well in Firefox for me, it felt like boring to try to investigate what was wrong. (This was in November 2013 perhaps.)
The things I don't like about TS, is that it takes long to compile. And that it takes a while to learn how to use it — I still don't know much about it actually. And I haven't found any good free TS editor on Linux. (I'm about to try Atom I think.)
If it's okay, I'd be interested in having a look at your Dart project? After all I spent fairly much time with Dart; it would be interesting to see what other people build with it :-)