Dart Programming Language

What is Dart

Dart is a general-purpose, high-level modern programming language which is originally developed by Google. It is the new programming language which is emerged in 2011, but its stable version was released in June 2017. Dart is not so popular at that time, but It gains popularity when it is used by the Flutter.

Dart is a dynamic, class-based, object-oriented programming language with closure and lexical scope. Syntactically, it is quite similar to Java, C, and JavaScript. If you know any of these programming languages, you can easily learn the Dart programming language.

Dart is an open-source programming language which is widely used to develop the mobile application, modern web-applications, desktop application, and the Internet of Things (IoT) using by Flutter framework. It also supports a few advance concepts such as interfaces, mixins, abstract classes, refield generics, and type interface. It is a compiled language and supports two types of compilation techniques.

• AOT (Ahead of Time) - It converts the Dart code in the optimized JavaScript code with the help of the dar2js compiler and runs on all modern web-browser. It compiles the code at build time.
• JOT (Just-In-Time) - It converts the byte code in the machine code (native code), but only code that is necessary.

Why Dart

We define the characteristics of Dart in the following point.

• Dart is a platform-independent language and supports all operating systems such as Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.
• It is an open-source language, which means it available free for everyone. It comes with a BSD license and recognized by the ECMA standard.
• It is an object-oriented programming language and supports all features of oops such as inheritance, interfaces, and optional type features.
• Dart is very useful in building real-time applications because of its stability.
• Dart comes with the dar2js compiler which transmits the Dart code into JavaScript code that runs on all modern web browser.
• The stand-alone Dart VM permits Dart code to run in a command-line interface environment.

Key Points to Remember

Before learning the Dart, we should keep these concepts in mind. These concepts are given below.

• Everything in Dart is treated as an object including, numbers, Boolean, function, etc. like Python. All objects inherit from the Object class.
• Dart tools can report two types of problems while coding, warnings and errors. Warnings are the indication that your code may have some problem, but it doesn't interrupt the code's execution, whereas error can prevent the execution of code.
• Dart supports sound typing. We will learn about this in the next tutorial.
• Dart supports generic types, like List<int>(a list of integers) or List<dynamic> (a list of objects of any type).

Dart Features

The Dart is an object-oriented, open-source programming language which contains many useful features. It is the new programming language and supports an extensive range of programming utilities such as interface, collections, classes, dynamic and optional typing. It is developed for the server as well as the browser. Below is the list of the important Dart features.

Open Source

Dart is an open-source programming language, which means it is freely available. It is developed by Google, approved by the ECMA standard, and comes with a BSD license.

Platform Independent

Dart supports all primary operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Macintosh, etc. The Dart has its own Virtual Machine which known as Dart VM, that allows us to run the Dart code in every operating system.

Object-Oriented

Dart is an object-oriented programming language and supports all oops concepts such as classes, inheritance, interfaces and optional typing features. It also supports advance concepts like mixin, abstract, classes, reified generic, and robust type system.

Browser Support

The Dart supports all modern web-browser. It comes with the dart2js compiler that converts the Dart code into optimized JavaScript code that is suitable for all type of web-browser.

Easy to learn

As we discussed in the previous section, learning the Dart is not the Hercules task as we know that Dart's syntax is similar to Java, C#, JavaScript, kotlin, etc. if you know any of these languages then you can learn easily the Dart.