https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/28617 provides some commentary on where things are, and what might happen next.

Agreed, one of my pass the time activities during covid was basically just spending the year trying out and evaluating different languages across a whole range of different metrics and features. For me Dart was the clear winner and I’ve never once regretted making it my new default, in fact it’s only increased its gap compared to everything else in the time since then.

Genuine question: what do you think is amazing about the language?

In two companies we already gave up on Dart and Flutter because of how it's backwards incompatible is. The language and frameworks moves very fast, it develops new tools and classes before the old ones become mature enough and adopted by the industry. Then suddenly, Flutter 27 lands, requires Dart 45, which requires intl 81.2.5. and now you can't compile anything anymore. Whole upgrade process, tools, compiles and libraries are broken for months before Google and OSS catches up. Once ecosystem is on Flutter 27 your upgrade path takes weeks, because a core method was renamed or compiler flag removed and CI/CD is failing. So you just move back to Java and Kotlin, where code from 2012 still compiles and works just fine.

It’s only maybe for the past two years now that it’s even been promoted as a general purpose language, which I think was a huge oversight on the Dart team’s behalf. For a long time they would just promote it as a great way to build UIs. What ever drove them to talk about it like that originally is beyond me.

The competition is too strong. At a team or organization level, where neither uses Flutter, why would you use Dart when C# and Kotlin exist? Both have better performance, better UX for doing common application tasks and vastly bigger ecosystems.

Go is doing exceptionally well while being a Google project. I don't think its a Google problem.

IMO Dart has become a niche Flutter language instead of a general-purpose language. Dart decided to focus on being a client-side language and it is very difficult to win over JS/TS.

> I feel like at this point Dart suffers from being a Google project

Not only Dart. Lit was completely abandoned without any public announcement. Soon it should be added to the killed by google website.

I think the main problem for Dart was that Typescript is simply the better approach for fixing Javascript (even though TS has its own share of problems with its 'kitchen sink type system').

It suffers from being the Flutter language, it was already given as dead outside Google, had it not been for Flutter.

I also advise watching the Angular documentary, where they briefly describe being forced to adopt Dart by management was a friction point, only sorted by letting them go with TypeScript, and AngularDart be its own thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRC9DlH45lA

It's a Google project: Batteries included, and once the batteries are empty, they throw the whole thing away

I also agree, supporting both tools seems unnecessary. In my experiences Kotlin multiplatform and compose multiplatform is vastly more enjoyable to write instead of Dart. The development environment alone has also been much easier to get started with using Kotlin multiplatform.

With Android’s frequent releases starting this year, I doubt Flutter can keep up.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/10/android-sd...

Dart/flutter of course predates a lot of this stuff. But the point is that Kotlin and Kotlin multiplatform are things that happened to Google that they ended up endorsing and embracing (to their credit).

When they were digging in with the Oracle lawsuit, their Android Java support fell behind a bit. And then Kotlin showed up as a drop in replacement and quickly became the default for a lot of Android development. It was so obviously nicer than Java 1.6 that many Android developers didn't bother waiting for kotlin 1.0 to be released even. Java support was eventually upgraded for Android but that took a while. Google made endorsing Kotlin official many years ago. Kotlin is now the preferred language for Android development. And while Java is still supported, using it is probably a mistake for new applications as Java API support increasingly an afterthought in both Android SDKs and the wider library ecosystem.

Google also pushed Flutter as a completely new way of doing UI and targeted it at a completely new OS (Fuchsia) that would replace Android. That never happened and Fuchsia is basically still around on life support but otherwise not going anywhere. Meanwhile, Flutter seems well liked by some but it's also a bit a weird techstack with its own language and compiler and fairly limited integration options. In short that whole techstack seems increasingly a bit of a dead end.

And crucially, Google has always pushed back on the notion of building any support for Kotlin around flutter, which was an obvious thing to start doing years ago. There are some weak arguments about native compilation here. But Java/kotlin were always compiled ahead of time on Android. So, I expect that the dominant arguments here were non technical and boil down to not invented here syndrome.

And now kotlin multiplatform (endorsed last year by Google) and compose multi platform are there. Compose multiplatform is interesting because it extends Google's own framework to other platforms (IOS, Web, Desktop). That has been an obvious thing to work on for a while but Google didn't want to go there because it had Flutter. But now Jetbrains has done it for them. The multiplatform support on IOS is getting quite nice. Native compilation, easy bindings between kotlin and swift code (both ways), etc.

It will be interesting to see if Google rallies behind compose multiplatform as well. IMHO they should and it's an opportunity to get a bit of control over IOS development and wrestle that away from Apple.

Thing is Dart is a shitty language with tradeoffs made specifically to make Flutter work well.

The terrible meta programming support shows in basic things such as JSON serialization. It's like Java--, I can't think of a reason to use it on backend over Java or Go.

It's not comparable to Javascript - despite it's warts, Javascript is very dynamic and when coupled with typescript that let's you do a lot of powerful things and describe it with the structural type system.

I have not used dart for a few years now but I've used it both when it was DartAngular and Dartium, and in flutter 2/3.

Don't get me wrong - the DX of writing flutter and fast reload is the best I've used in mobile space, but the language itself is terrible and I would not use it in any other scenario.