Google has released an SDK for Dart and several new language features and improvements, such as: an Editor, Dartium, faster VM, a numbers of libraries, a package manager and others.
A year after the initial release of Dart, Google has announced a new milestone for their programming language targeting web applications. This version comes with an SDK and several new features and improvements:
- The Dart VM is faster than V8 on several Octane tests
- A new Dart to JavaScript translator
- An HTML library
- A JavaScript interop library
- An Eclipse-based editor running on Windows/Linux/Mac OS X. IntelliJ developers can use a Dart plug-in.
- Dartium, a Chrome build including the Dart VM for running and debugging Dart code without having to translate it to JavaScript.
- An I/O library for server-side applications running on a stand-alone Dart VM
- A language specification
Dart SDK includes the libraries, a Dart-to-JavaScript compiler (dart2js), Dart VM (dart), and Dart package manager (pub). The libraries contain the following APIs:
- dart:core – basic functionality including numbers, strings, collections, date and time, asynchronous programming, utility classes
- dart:math – math and random
- dart:html – DOM, HTTPRequest, WebSockets
- dart:isolate – concurrency classes
- dart:io – API for command-line applications
- dart:json – encoding/decoding JSON
- dart:utf – Unicode
- dart:crypto – hash codes
The package manager can be used to access and install public modules created by various users for Dart applications. Examples of such modules are: js – accessing JavaScript from Dart, web_components – MDV (Model-driven Views) web components, mongo_dart – Dart driver for MongoDB, puremvc – a framework for creating MVC applications, html5lib – a library for HTML docs, and others.
According to the Dart team, the language still needs improvement and refining before it can be considered ready. They promise to maintain backward compatibility.
The source code of the entire Dart project is available on Google Code.