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Ask HN: What would it take to put Dart in browsers?

11 points by yellow_and_gray ↗ HN
Dart is a language developed at Google whose goal is "ultimately to replace JavaScript as the lingua franca of web development on the open web platform".

But after three years of being released, and despite being powerful, there aren't strong enough signs of adoption. It received a share of criticism from the industry[1], including the following comment from Mozilla's previous CEO Brendan Eich, who developed the Javascript language:

"I guarantee you that Apple and Microsoft (and Opera and Mozilla, but the first two are enough) will never embed the Dart VM."

Lukewarm adoption is always understandable of new things but this seems political. You'd hope big cos would give a fair shot to a better web and yet you get the semblance of a second Cold War.

If the big guys control the web and not even them can fix it, what would it take then to replace Javascript?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dart_(programming_language)#Criticism

8 comments

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msie
I wonder when Google will put Dart in Chrome (note: not Chromium where it's been for a while)?
melling
Yes, Google needs to give developers a better reason to use it. Much faster performance in Chrome would help.
rubiquity
The best thing that could ever happen to the web is every browser using the same byte code interpreter and we can write web apps in any language that has a compiler to that byte code. Something as ubiquitous as the browser should not be dominated by a single programming language.
RandomBK
So asm.js? Its certainly getting close to that point.
rubiquity
asm.js is just a subset of JavaScript. It essentially just limits you to the parts of JS that can be optimized by compilers. Byte code is entirely different.
jaachan
Fix it? Fix what? Javascript is continuously rising up to the challenges of the web. What's there to fix?

"The most dangerous thing to a new invention is a current product that is 'good enough'."

MalcolmDiggs
It's hard to discount the effect of momentum at this stage. In some respects Google is just tardy to the party. The ECMAScript vs whatever discussions happened circa 1995, the decisions have been made, and there's 20 years of near universal adoption there.

Then again...browsers will do what they need to do to keep users. If Dart allows devs to build things that aren't possible in js, then devs will lean on users to use browsers that are compatible with their newly built sites. Users flocking to a new browser will make the other browsers catch up.

So, it all starts with the capabilities of Dart itself. Make it kick javascript's butt, put it in chrome by default, and the rest should take care of itself.