UPDATE: Dartium has landed.
In today’s Dart G+ hangout with the Google Dart team the Developers announced that Dartium is available(at least it will be available in a few hours - please stay tuned for changes on Dartlang.org. I will update this post once it has been officially released).
What does it mean? It means you can run native Dart inside the Browser - without the need to compile it to JavaScript.
This is an important step for the Dart team as this is the first browser supporting Dart natively. As Dart itself is very complex and very young at age, the Dart team has decided to first create a fork of the well known Chromium browser.
Dartium is considered to be in “technical preview” state - the browser is not recommended to be used at daily work. It might have security flaws and cause other problems. Dart Team asks users to try it out and report all bugs back to the Dart team.
It is expected that Dartium can run both, JavaScript and Dart, at the same time. Anyway problems might occur.
Each Dart script will run as an own Isolate. Heavy Isolates in Dart will spawn an own process in the browser, while Darts heavy isolates generated to JavaScript would generate to Webworkers.
To enable Dart script in the Dartium browser, you just need a script tag with “application/dart” and everything between these tag will be considered Dart script (similar to JavaScript). Dartium does support debugging a running Dart script which was hardly missed feature already. Even an experimental caching solution (often referred as Snapshots) is in place. Experimental, because it might bring up several security flaws. The Snapshot feature is expected to reduce Dart startup and execution time.
The Dart team specifically asks users to work with multiple script tags and the Isolates.
Tags: #Dart #JavaScript #Open Source