Google launches Dart SDK 1.0 for web developers

USA: Search engine giant on Thursday announced the release of the Dart SDK 1.0, a cross-browser, open source toolkit for structured web applications.

Announcing the open source toolkit for the web developer's community, Lars Bak, software engineer and chief dartisan at Google said, "In the two years since we first announced Dart, we've been working closely with early adopters to mature the project and grow the community. This release marks Dart's transition to a production-ready option for web developers."

The Dart SDK 1.0 includes what an engineer needs to write structured web applications.

Together, these pieces can help make development workflow simpler, faster, and more scalable as projects grow from a few scripts to full-fledged web applications, said Google.

On the tools side, the SDK includes Dart Editor, a lightweight but powerful Dart development environment.

We wanted to give developers the tools to manage a growing code base, so we added code completion, refactoring, jump to definition, a debugger, hints and warnings, and lots more, said Bak and further added, "Dart also offers an instant edit/refresh cycle with Dartium, a custom version of Chromium with the native Dart VM."

Outside the browser, the Dart VM can also be used for asynchronous server side computation.

According to Google, for deployment, dart2js is a translator that allows web developer Dart code to run in modern browsers.

The performance of generated JavaScript has improved dramatically since our initial release and is in many cases getting close to that of idiomatic JavaScript. In fact, the dart2js output of the DeltaBlue benchmark now runs even faster than idiomatic JavaScript, similarly, dart2js output code size has been reduced substantially, added Bak.

Google said, the performance of the VM continues to improve as well; it's now between 42 per cent to 130 per cent, which is faster than idiomatic JavaScript running in V8, depending on the benchmark.

Dart is an open-source Web programming language developed by Google and was unveiled at the GOTO conference in Aarhus, 2011.

Although, Dart is currently not natively supported in any main stream browser, the main aim of Dart is to replace JavaScript.