In this episode, I talked about the evolution of the Dart programming language.

The Dart language improves greatly from release to release. Since 2.0, Dart has a sound type system. Since then, many valuable features were added to the language, for example int-to-double conversion, set literals, as well as operators to improve code that performs list manipulation: the spread operator, collection if and for operators. Extension methods were a great addition to the language and they enable you to add any functionality to any type, even types you don't own, thus making your code very expressive. 

Since Dart 2.12, the language supports sound null safety. When you opt into null safety, types in your code are non-nullable by default, meaning that variables can’t contain null unless you say they can. With null safety, your runtime null-dereference errors turn into edit-time analysis errors.

This podcast episode builds heavily on the official Dart documentation and version announcements.

Resources

• Dart language evolution
• Null Safety with Randal Schwartz - Flutter 101 Podcast
• Wikipedia on Dart
• My poll about Dart from the Flutter Munich meetups
• Great packages with extension methods
  • time
  • dartx
  • kt.dart
• Dart announcements
  • Dart 2.13 - New type aliases language feature, improved Dart FFI
  • Dart 2.12 - Sound null safety and Dart FFI ship to the stable channel.
  • Dart 2.7 - A safer, more expressive Dart
  • Dart 2.3  - Optimized for building user interfaces
  • Dart 2.0 - Optimized for client-side development
• Optional semicolons issue on GitHub

Host: Vince Varga

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