Super excited about this! There was a long discussion on the webkit mailing list after google tried to add support for multiple language VMs in webkit. The goal was to have a native Dart VM.
"Whatever it wants" within reason. We're actually quite concerned about how new features are added to the web platform, and recognize the need to be careful about what we commit to support forever. See http://www.chromium.org/blink#new-features for some detail about the process we're planning on using going forward.
Additionally: we have had experimental Dart+Chromium builds for a long time, they use a different approach (V8 bindings layer) that doesn't require WebKit changes. However we only use these builds for fast development edit+refresh, for deploying Dart code you should use dart2js (it's just like deploying CoffeeScript, C code via emscripten, etc).
Yeah, tone can be hard to guess from text. Figured the link would be helpful either way :)
disclaimer: I'm on the Dart team (libraries, not core language/VM/dart2js). As exciting as it would be to have Dart VM in Chrome, personally I hope the order is more like:
* dart2js and VM work the same way (basically true already, modulo a few quirks unlikely to affect program behavior. It's not any worse than your typical web standard polyfill, probably a lot better.)
* The language spec is standardized.
* People like Dart, and it becomes really popular for building web apps.
* We have great Dart<->JS interop and it's possible to make the two native VMs work nicely together in the same browser.
* The toolchain makes it practically impossible for a web developer to publish an app that only has .dart files, without the .js version that works on all browsers.
* At that point, it might make sense to add the Dart VM to a browser purely a performance optimization.
Of course a lot could change between now and then. For example, if JS engines keep getting faster and introduce enough fast stuff (like typed arrays, asm.js, etc), maybe we can achieve the speed we need with dart2js.
Fortunately, there are plenty of folks that work on Blink/Chromium that share both the enthusiasm and skepticism that the web community has about Dart. As someone that works on it, I deeply want our team to succeed, but I would like to see it happen in the right way--open web and open source friendly.
yeah, if you're running directly on a VM for the language (e.g. JS on a JS engine, Dart on a Dart engine) you wouldn't need source maps for debugging, unless you are using some other tool that is doing source->source transforms for you (e.g. https://github.com/dart-lang/web-ui currently does some dart->dart source transforms). You'd still have source maps for the dart2js output.
I've only read the first dozen of so entries of that thread but it's so depressing…
We've been waiting for Apple to include support for the W3C Navigation Timing for a long time so their pissing match over multi-VM support in WebKit because it doesn't conform to standards rings hollow.
A long time? The working draft is dated January this year.
The multi vm discussion was in 2011. If you think supporting dart natively in a browser is a good thing you're either a google employee or have your head too far up googles ass to see they are the new Microsoft and this is/was an attempt no different than vbscript in ie
https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/...
If I remember correctly, the patch was not merged in. I guess now google can do whatever it wants!