Google reveals Dart - a JavaScript rival

Google blogger Lars Bak talks about Dart, a new programming language that seems to be a JavaScript rival. You can read about it over here. Dart can run on a native virtual machine but the search giant also provides a compiler that translates Dart code to JavaScript, enabling it to run on any modern browser. Future versions of Chrome may be able to run Dart natively.

Today we are introducing an early preview of Dart, a class-based optionally typed programming language for building web applications. Dart’s design goals are:

Create a structured yet flexible language for web programming.

Make Dart feel familiar and natural to programmers and thus easy to learn.

Ensure that Dart delivers high performance on all modern web browsers and environments ranging from small handheld devices to server-side execution.

Dart targets a wide range of development scenarios: from a one-person project without much structure to a large-scale project needing formal types in the code to state programmer intent. To support this wide range of projects, Dart has optional types; this means you can start coding without types and add them later as needed. We believe Dart will be great for writing large web applications.