I'm in the early stages of something "real", and I'm finding it very useful. I think if someone is already very familiar with and is mostly happy with JavaScript and its ecosystem, they might not see much of value (or maybe they would). For me, however, I can get small things done in JavaScript but tend to be overwhelmed by the ecosystem, and I'm far more comfortable in Dart. The core libraries are great, and having class-based object-orientation makes me much more comfortable than the prototype stuff in JavaScript.
Yes. I'm in the process of finishing up a touch enabled web app for a client and we're all very pleased with the result. Since Dart is in development and has been changing, I've stuck to a small subset of features, basically easy DOM manipulation with classes. The resulting JavaScript from Dart2js has worked flawlessly across browsers (Chrome/FF/Safari on Win/Mac/iOS.) I believe there will come a time when clients specify Dart because it saves them time, money and maintenance problems.
One of my favorites: http://glyph3d.com "Glyph3D is a font atlas generation tool. It enables game developers / artists to create beautiful font atlas maps using various filter effects."
Guessing being able to use native SIMD instructions inside the Dart VM should help with gaming and other graphics intensive apps:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKh7UOELpPo
I don't think the SIMD optimizations have actually landed yet, and if they have it would have been very recently, and the Dart VM has been beating V8 for a while.
Considering moving to Sublime for all text/script editing after finding out that it's an impressive universal toolbox with awesome packages at your finger tips in this comprehensive video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ-bgcJ6fQo
Why wouldn't they, TypeScript does nothing to improve JS performance, faster start-up or iteration times, optimal tree-shaking, etc, it just makes it worse.
I would say that one of Dart's goals is certainly toolability. We ship a Dart Editor, and an analyzer, that supports refactoring, code completion, jump to definition, and more.
As I see it, TypeScript brings static typing and better tooling to the existing Javascript stack; Dart is a green field effort to reinvent the stack with some static typing and better tooling, among other things (new APIs, a faster VM, etc...).
[disclaimer: MS employee and PL designer/enthusiast, but no relationship with TypeScript]
TypeScript has almost no buzz, interest or excitement surrounding it that I can detect, which is sad because I think it's a good effort and great tool. I would appreciate it, if someone could point me to an active and growing TypeScript community.
As for TypeScript tracking ES6, I just watched "Kit Cambridge, "EcmaScript Next: The Subtleties of ES 6" at W3Conf 2013" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt0f2XdvriQ and am really kind of stunned at how much I hate ES6 now, when before I knew nothing about it.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 62.7 ms ] threadhttp://amartya.in/post/48107255194/introducing-dart-to-an-hc...
Guessing being able to use native SIMD instructions inside the Dart VM should help with gaming and other graphics intensive apps: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKh7UOELpPo
Also it's great to see Dart's Sublime support improved: http://news.dartlang.org/2013/02/using-dart-with-sublime-tex...
Considering moving to Sublime for all text/script editing after finding out that it's an impressive universal toolbox with awesome packages at your finger tips in this comprehensive video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ-bgcJ6fQo
More so, Dart has it's own VM.
Dart is also focused on improving the state of web development with Web Components http://www.dartlang.org/articles/web-ui/ - fixing the DOM with a holistic and consistent API: http://www.dartlang.org/articles/improving-the-dom/ - and providing a single unified abstraction for classes and IO providing much better composability than the fragmentation seen in JS.
Dart already has some small traction and it's not even 1.0 yet -- they just froze the core library APIs.
So, not only they are "still working on it", they have not even released it properly yet.
Not to mention it has totally different goals related to TypeScript (TS = tooling, Dart = performance, language design).
[disclaimer: I work on the Dart team.]
[disclaimer: MS employee and PL designer/enthusiast, but no relationship with TypeScript]
As for TypeScript tracking ES6, I just watched "Kit Cambridge, "EcmaScript Next: The Subtleties of ES 6" at W3Conf 2013" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt0f2XdvriQ and am really kind of stunned at how much I hate ES6 now, when before I knew nothing about it.
Dart hits the sweet spot for me.
https://github.com/borisyankov/DefinitelyTyped