What I Learned Writing a Small Page in Dart One Evening

1. It has a high entry barrier for a JS developer, as it involves mastering both the standard library (for many elements like input and select, Dart has its own types) and the old “new” types (for example, an array, by default, can only contain numbers. For everything else, you need to explicitly specify. It’s a small thing, but there are many such details).
2. However, the language itself is quite clear and simple (the syntax resembles a mix of JS, Python, Go, and C/C#), as are its tools - the package manager pub and the project generator stagehand. One can quickly grasp the basics and start coding.
3. Compared to pure JS, it tends to lose out (especially with ES2016+). The final file size of JS will be smaller, as will the amount of code lines.
4. Following from point 3, using Dart without frameworks is a highly questionable pleasure.
5. The same with them, as Dart can only be used for AngularDart, which has diverged so much from other Angular versions that it has essentially become a separate project. There are also 1.5 bindings for React and Vue, which are hardly updated… In short, everything is not great.
6. It looks very interesting in combination with Flutter, which, according to some parameters, already outperforms ReactNative (and Electron, even more so).

Conclusion: Dart is an interesting language, but learning it without combining it with Flutter and focusing on mobile development doesn’t make much sense. It won’t add much value to your career either. A search on Indeed for Moscow shows 3 vacancies for Dart and 121 for TypeScript (for comparison, there are 2 vacancies for Haskell 😏).

TAGS:

• Dart
• Front End Development
• Web Development
• JavaScript
• Flutter