The complex web application language Dart has celebrated its first birthday with the first release of the Dart SDK. The Dart development team at Google confirms that it has ploughed through thousands of bug reports and feature requests from the web community to now release a more stable and comprehensive version of Dart.
As detailed here on Dr. Dobb's in September of this year by Dart project developer advocate Seth Ladd (when the language was in Technology Preview stage), "Dart helps developers build fast HTML5 apps for the Web. This open source project is building a 'batteries included' developer platform that integrates a new language, libraries, an editor, a virtual machine, and a compiler (with JavaScript output)."
In a video hosted on blog.chromium.org, Ladd explains that this class-based, object-oriented, dynamic language will be attractive to programmers familiar with C#, ActionScript, and JavaScript. New in this version of Dart is a faster Dart Virtual Machine that, on some Octane tests, is said to outperform even V8.
New features also include an HTML library that works "transparently" on modern browsers, a library to interoperate with JavaScript code, a new package manager called Pub, and Dartium, a Chromium build with native Dart support.
"Over the following months, we will continue to work hard to evolve the SDK, improve Dart's robustness and performance, and fine-tune the language while maintaining backwards compatibility," said Lars Bak, Google software engineer and author of the V8 JavaScript engine.
Bak also notes that Dart Editor on dartlang.org comes with a server-side I/O library and a copy of the open-source SDK and Dartium.
