The challenger is dead, long live... old king JavaScript

Jun 9, 2015 13:49 GMT  ·  By

In a series of grim announcements that started in March and ended a few days ago, Google announces in veiled terms that it's giving up on Dart, a scripting language the company designed to replace JavaScript.

With an adoption rate close to zero amongst developers, the language itself was a success, but so were many others in the past. Developed in the quest for a JavaScript replacement, Dart merged features found in Java, Python, and JavaScript, with the ultimate purpose of helping advance Web programming to a new era.

Dart apps are generally very fast out of the box, and their only glaring problem right now is the lack of support for the Dart VM from major browser vendors. Nevertheless, Dart code works in all browsers, since it can be compiled to JavaScript via the dart2js toolkit.

After announcing in March that it would stop pushing for the Dart VM to be integrated with browsers, Google also pointed out a future course for the entire language, putting a focus for future versions on compatibility when compiling to JavaScript.

This bleak announcement was completed at the end of May with the death blow to the Chrome Dev Editor, a Dart IDE built on top of Chrome, which Google gave up on just as the Dart community was finally viewing it as a stable and usable product.

Help me Obi Wan Kenobi GitHub, you're my only hope!

Along with this news, Google also revealed it would be moving all the Dart source code on GitHub, from the SDK itself to various Dart-related tools, and the core libraries and packages Google had officially taken under its wing.

This is practically a Hail Mary pass, a last-ditch effort to get the community to buy-in on the product, and boost the adoption rate by any means.

There's little to no sense in investing resources on Google's part into a technology nobody uses or cares about, even if the final product has been critically approved as a better JavaScript than JavaScript itself.

Putting its chips on the open source community is not a bad option, but we doubt Google would have relinquished control of Dart if everything went according to its original plan.

Update: The article was updated to clarify the "the lack of support from major browsers" section.