Comment by socalgal2
6 days ago
> Google would have to take the lead and implement this in chrome then enough developers would have to build sites using it and force safari and firefox to comply. It just isn't feasible.
They already tried. It was called Dart and for a while there was an experimental flag to enable it directly in Chrome. It was cancelled and Dart was relegated to transpiling to JS/WASM.
There was a complete fork to support it, Dartium.
https://chromium.googlesource.com/dart/dartium/src/
Dart is only around because it was rescued by AdWords team, which had just migrated from GWT into AngularDart, and wasn't happy to do yet another transition.
Most of the key names from Smalltalk/Self background that were part of Dart 1.0 left the team at this point.
It managed to stay around long enough to get the attention of the Flutter team, originally their prototype was done in JavaScript, which is also the reason why Dart 2.0 was a complete reboot of its type system, from dynamically typed with optional typing, to strongly typed language with type inference.
And it isn't as if Flutter is a great success, Fuchsia never made it big, the Android team counter attacked with Kotlin's adoption, JetPack Compose, and Kotlin Multiplatform.
> JetPack Compose, and Kotlin Multiplatform
More like JetBrains dragged Google kicking and screaming into multiplatform, given how piece of a shit setup is.
Google is the only OS vendor that outsources all their development setup, I am surprised that by now they haven't yet acquired JetBrains.
> And it isn't as if Flutter is a great success, Fuchsia never made it big, the Android team counter attacked with Kotlin's adoption, JetPack Compose, and Kotlin Multiplatform.
Sorry but I can't find my way through the double negatives in this (does "isn't as if" apply just to Flutter or the whole sentence?), and I'm not so familiar with that ecosystem that I know myself. Are you saying that Flutter isn't a great success and has instead been superseded by Kotlin? Or that it was a success and that's why Android team counter attacked?
I think I figured out that the parent meant:
> Flutter is not a great success; Fuchsia never made it big, and the Android team counter attacked with Kotlin's adoption, JetPack Compose, and Kotlin Multiplatform.
(Despite being much derided when output by LLMs, a semicolon would've really helped me here!)
Partly my confusion came from having heard of both Flutter and Fuschia but having no idea they were connected. In fact I only knew of Flutter working on Android (and other non-Google OSs).
Anyway, it's true that Flutter is not as widely used as an Android replacement would be (if Fuchsia had turned out to be that) but for a UI framework it's reasonably well used and pretty great at cross mobile/desktop development.
Agreed that Dart was an effort to do exactly this.
To be a bit pedantic... "relegated to transpiling to JS" makes it sound like that was something they had to do later, but in fact that was up front part of the transition plan. The idea was, write your code in Dart and it would work natively in browsers that (eventually) support it but would still work in everything else via JS transpilation. You're right that it was relegated to only working that way once it was rejected.
The problem was (if the Wikipedia article is to be believed) that developers took offense to one company unilaterally deciding on the future scripting language of the web. A little ironic given that's how JS evolved in the first place, but fair enough. Later, WASM was created instead, with the idea that no particular language had to be chosen (and frozen) as the JS replacement. Dart compilation to WASM followed.