Dart to receive its own set of Material Design UI widgets

Jul 24, 2016 14:00 GMT  ·  By

Google announced last week that it created a Dart version of its famous AngularJS JavaScript framework.

Until this week, Google's engineers used TypeScript to write the core source code of the AngularJS framework, which was then compiled to JavaScript and distributed to the masses.

From this final version, the Google team then created a Dart version of the framework, which it would use internally, for things like AdWords, where Dart is the main technology that powers the service.

Now, Google has announced the creation of AngularDart, a separate branch of the Angular 2 codebase written directly in Dart, instead of TypeScript.

A split was needed to simplify development, speed up Angular

Google says that this will help the Dart community by using Dart features that couldn't ever work with the TypeScript version, and wouldn't have ever been implemented.

This would make AngularDart faster than AngularJS, but Dart, in general, is considered faster than JavaScript.

There is good news for JavaScript developers as well, since the removal of Dart-related support code from the Angular base code will make the TypeScript/JavaScript version smaller and faster.

Google said that the two branches will share some of the same APIs, where possible, but will also be very different, with the Dart version containing more "Dart-y features."

"For example, in the 2 weeks since we started work on the purely Dart version, we were already able to unleash strong mode on the code and were able to significantly improve the code quality (fixed 1000+ warnings)," Google's  Filip Hráček writes.

Dart gets Material Design UI components

Additionally, Google has announced it will be publicly releasing an extensive set of UI components written in AngularDart and using the company's Material Design philosophy.

These components won't be part of the AngularDart codebase but will be shipped with the basic Dart distribution.