I tried to give Dart a go at work. We invested about a month's worth of work for a 4-person team into it, kicking the tires, and giving it a go before we gave up and went back to Javascript.
I hope Dart succeeds, as it's a really nice language. And it's great to see the spec published as an ECMA standard. It was a dream to work in compared to Javascript, and I was overly hopeful that it could be used in production. But we found out within a month that it is not.
What killed it for us was browser support. The supported browsers for dart2js is the "latest chrome and firefox" and in the forums they planned to support the last two internet explorer versions. At the time of our experiment, IE 9 and 10 were supported but not 11, even though 11 was out for a few months already. At the time, our app would randomly crash in IE11.
So this forced us to ask two questions: 1) will this happen in future IE releases where we leave a portion of our early-browser-adopting users SOL, and 2) a very large portion of the population is still stuck on older versions of IE and FireFox.
So Dart wasn't a good fit for us not because of the language, but because we simply couldn't use it in our business environment where we had to support actual users who use the latest versions of IE as well as older ones. We were already dropping all IE8 users to support Dart, but looking today they plan on dropping IE9 support soon too which makes up a large portion of our users.
Anyhow, I hope Dart succeeds, I really do, because it's a great language and I'd much prefer to use it over javascript. But unless its current implementation is more business friendly and realistic we can't use it.
I hope Dart succeeds, as it's a really nice language. And it's great to see the spec published as an ECMA standard. It was a dream to work in compared to Javascript, and I was overly hopeful that it could be used in production. But we found out within a month that it is not.
What killed it for us was browser support. The supported browsers for dart2js is the "latest chrome and firefox" and in the forums they planned to support the last two internet explorer versions. At the time of our experiment, IE 9 and 10 were supported but not 11, even though 11 was out for a few months already. At the time, our app would randomly crash in IE11.
So this forced us to ask two questions: 1) will this happen in future IE releases where we leave a portion of our early-browser-adopting users SOL, and 2) a very large portion of the population is still stuck on older versions of IE and FireFox.
So Dart wasn't a good fit for us not because of the language, but because we simply couldn't use it in our business environment where we had to support actual users who use the latest versions of IE as well as older ones. We were already dropping all IE8 users to support Dart, but looking today they plan on dropping IE9 support soon too which makes up a large portion of our users.
Anyhow, I hope Dart succeeds, I really do, because it's a great language and I'd much prefer to use it over javascript. But unless its current implementation is more business friendly and realistic we can't use it.