The Dart Programming Language

Published on 21 June 2018 (Updated: 15 May 2023)

Welcome to the Dart page! Here, you'll find a description of the language as well as a list of sample programs in that language.

This article was written by:

Jeremy Grifski
Ron Zuckerman

Description

Dart is a general-purpose language that was designed with five goals:

Productive
- Dart's syntax is clear and concise, its tooling simple yet powerful. Sound typing helps you to identify subtle errors early. Dart has battle-hardened core libraries and an ecosystem of thousands of packages
Fast
- Dart provides optimizing ahead-of-time compilation to get predictably high performance and fast startup across mobile devices and the web.
Portable
- Dart compiles to ARM and x86 code, so that Dart mobile apps can run natively on iOS, Android, and beyond. For web apps, Dart compiles to JavaScript.
Approachable
- Dart is familiar to many existing developers, thanks to its unsurprising object orientation and syntax. If you already know C++, C#, or Java, you can be productive with Dart in just a few days.
Reactive
- Dart is well-suited to reactive programming, with support for managing short-lived objects, such as UI widgets, through Dart's fast object allocation and generational garbage collector. Dart supports asynchronous programming through language features and APIs that use Future and Stream objects.

Since its inception, Dart has gone through different phases as Google tried to sell its potential to developers. Google has rebuilt it's advertising service AdSense with Dart. That demonstrate's Google's commitment to Dart by depending on the language for it's main method of generating revenue.

The language also has many great features like garbage collection and a strong typing system (as of Dart 2.0). All of it sits on top of a VM like Java, which allows there to be less configuration between the test side and the source code. A programmer can just get started from the get-go!

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