Dart (programming language)

Dart is a programming language designed by Lars Bak and Kasper Lund and developed by Google. The programming language can be used to develop web and mobile apps as well as server and desktop applications. It is an object-oriented, class-based, garbage-collected language with C-style syntax. It can compile to either machine code, JavaScript, or WebAssembly. It supports interfaces, mixins, abstract classes, reified generics and type inference. Dart was unveiled at the GOTO conference in Aarhus, Denmark, October 10–12, 2011. Lars Bak and Kasper Lund founded the project. Dart 1.0 was released on November 14, 2013. Dart had a mixed reception at first. Some criticized the Dart initiative for fragmenting the web because of plans to include a Dart VM in Chrome. Those plans were dropped in 2015 with the Dart 1.9 release. Focus changed to compiling Dart code to JavaScript. Dart 2.0 was released in August 2018 with language changes including a type system. Dart 2.6 introduced a new extension, dart2native. This extended native compilation to the Linux, macOS, and Windows desktop platforms. Earlier developers could create new tools using only Android or iOS devices. With this extension, developers could deploy a program into self-contained executables. The Dart SDK doesn't need to be installed to run these self-contained executables. The Flutter toolkit integrates Dart, so it can compile on small services like backend support. Dart 3.0 changed the type system to require sound null safety. This release included new features like records, patterns, and class modifiers. Dart 3 also previewed support for Web Assembly. Dart released the 5th edition of its language specification on April 9, 2021. This covers all syntax through Dart 2.10. A draft of the 6th edition includes all syntax through 2.13. Accepted proposals for the specification and drafts of potential features can be found in the Dart language repository on GitHub. ECMA International formed technical committee, TC52, to standardize Dart.