I remember in the earlier days of Dart there was an initial push to ship a Dart VM natively inside browsers.

I so often wish that idea actually ended up getting some real traction because I think it could have moved web development in general forward by several years overnight.

This is incredible, not to mention extensive, work!

I've never really had the need to microbenchmark Dart code, but I think with NNBD soon becoming a reality, we might see a lot more interest in writing pure Dart or server side Dart/Flutter. Though it is a bit strange to think of Flutter being used server side as it's known as a graphical toolkit, it provides a lot of useful infrastructure for Dart programming and you can basically just ignore the graphics part.

This is the kind of work we'll need to have done if we ever want something like Pythons timeit module available for Dart.

Also, really cool to see proof in the ARM assembly that when you enable NNBD, the compiler can take advantage of that extra information at such a low level to increase performance. For example, in the article numIterations is unboxed, because the compiler can't be sure it is not null.