If all you use javascript for is console.log("Hello World"); then v8 will seem unnecessarily large too.
If all you do is one DOM transformation then jquery will seem huge compared to just doing it by hand (probably hundreds or thousands of lines of code vs 3).
I guess at this point I'm just repeating the OP, but this is simply in no way demonstrative of Dart. It can at best serve as a learning tool of the internals (and perhaps there are valid criticisms once you look at those), but any conclusion on code size is very flawed from this one example.
jQuery is huge compared to doing it by hand, and I actually chose against jQuery for a web service targeted at mobile phones.
However, in the case of jQuery the productivity / KB ratio is freakishly huge.
I fail to see how that will be the case for a new programming language. Javascript is already fast and still improving in bounds and leaps. It is also finally possible to write correct cross-browser code with the help of jQuery and CoffeeScript. It is a true standard.
What can Dart really provide that Javascript cannot?
Refactoring tools? Some people would like that, but it still won't be bullet proof (as I understand the static types in Dart are optional), and there's nothing worse that a tool on which you can't rely on (personally I hate the Intellisense attempts being made in IDEs for Ruby or Python).
What about speed? Well, Java/Quake2 was compiled to Javascript using GWT and it worked just fine -- what more could you want from a sandboxed environment? To me, these days big page load times either on my desktop or on my mobile are almost always related to bandwidth.
v8 actually runs the code, though, so it's not an accurate comparison.
(That said, this thread is just silly. I don't like Dart because it looks like it's built for obsolescense, but the hello world extrapolation is nonsense, as has been pointed out.)
If all you do is one DOM transformation then jquery will seem huge compared to just doing it by hand (probably hundreds or thousands of lines of code vs 3).
I guess at this point I'm just repeating the OP, but this is simply in no way demonstrative of Dart. It can at best serve as a learning tool of the internals (and perhaps there are valid criticisms once you look at those), but any conclusion on code size is very flawed from this one example.