Celebrating Dart’s birthday with the first release of the Dart SDK

By Lars Bak, Software Engineer

A year ago we released a technology preview of Dart, a project that includes a modern language, libraries and tools for building complex web applications. Today, after plowing through thousands of bug reports and feature requests from the web community, a new, more stable and comprehensive version of Dart is now available and ready to use.



With this version of the Dart SDK, we’ve made several improvements and added many features:

• A faster Dart Virtual Machine that on some Octane tests outperforms even V8.
• A new Dart to JavaScript translator that generates fast and compact output.
• An HTML library that works transparently on modern browsers.
• A library to interoperate with JavaScript code.
• An easy to use editor.
• Pub, a new package manager
• Dartium, a Chromium build with native Dart support.
• A server-side I/O library.
• A language specification describing the Dart semantics, including new features.

Over the following months, we will continue to work hard to evolve the SDK, improve Dart’s robustness and performance, and fine-tune the language while maintaining backwards compatibility.

You can download the Dart Editor from dartlang.org. It comes with a copy of the open-source SDK and Dartium. Thanks again for all your feedback – keep it coming.


Lars Bak is a veteran virtual machinist, leaving marks on several software systems: Beta, Self, Strongtalk, Sun's HotSpot and CLDC HI, OOVM Smalltalk, and V8.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor