Dart Part 3 - Libraries

Unlike CoffeeScript and TypeScript Dart is not really meant to be compiled to JavaScript. You certainly can compile it to JavaScript but the long term goal of the language is to replace JavaScript. That’s a goal which is at least a decade out. Truth be told I don’t see Dart ever replacing JavaScript wholesale. Selling Dart to Microsoft and to Mozilla is going to be quite a thing when there is already such acceptance of JavaScript. JavaScript hangs around rank 9-11 in the language ranking while Dart is not even in the top 50. That’s not to say that Dart isn’t a fantastic language it is just new and facing a pretty entrenched competitor.

So being a full replacement for JavaScript Dart must also fulfill the role of many of the fantastic libraries which have become commonplace in the land of JavaScript. Dart includes a number of libraries for manipulating html, performing asynchronous actions, running mathematical operations and even fir file I/O. These library create a sort of base class library the same as what you get with Java and .net. Obviously they are too large to cover in a single post. I thought I might talk a bit about dart:html which is the library designed for manipulating and queryingHTML.

The first thing in the html library is a sizzle like selector engine which works on CSS3 selectors. It is easily usable via the query and queryAll functions. Query returns an Element and queryAll returns a list of elements. These elements can be manipulated just as you would in JavaScript. For instance this code will add a colour a couple of divs

On the trivial html test page I put together the result was

Coloured boxes thanks to dart

Exciting!

If you look back at part 1 of this series I mentioned that there was some concert over the amount of crud which was created by Dart during a normal compile. To make these boxes dart2js generated 1891 lines of code. Humm”¦ that seems excessive. But it isn’t really a fair comparison is it? I included dart:html which is likely huge as it contains a bunch of the functionality of jQuery. If you read the Dart documentation it suggests that Dart will actually trim out functions which are not used. There is also a ““minify flag which can be passed to the dart2js compiler. Using the minify option the library is shrunk way down and the results are in line with other selector libraries.

“Not terrible but not fantastic” pretty much sums up my feelings about Dart in general.