Can Dart be used as a general-purpose language? [closed]

Question

Dart supports interfacing with the native libraries (Ref: http://www.dartlang.org/articles/native-extensions-for-standalone-dart-vm/). There are some decent libraries available for socket communication, interfacing with databases and dealing with filesystems. Barring desktop GUI applications, I don't see any reason why it cannot be used as a general purpose language. What are advantages/disadvantages of Dart being used as a general purpose language (including performance)?

Elenore

Answer 1

Yes. Dart can be used as a general purpose programming language.

Advantages:

• It's fast, already faster than V8, and catching up to the JVM (Though it starts up much quicker).
• It's great for scripting on macos/linux. You can prefix a source file with #!/usr/bin/env dart
• Backed by a large team/company who are developing it in the open, along with an active community.
• Good documentation and articles.

Disadvantages:

• It's new. There are far more libraries available for Java, Python and node.js than for Dart.
• There are likely to be changes to the core IO libraries before it hits 1.0.
• No built-in support on cloud-hosting platforms, though there is a heroku buildpack.

Note you can build GUI applications using dart2js and chrome packaged apps.

Zobe

"fast, already faster than V8, and catching up to the JVM". Did you just describe beating Javascript as "fast". :-) – Lett