[dart-misc] What will become Dartino features ?

[Alexandre Ardhuin]

Hi all,

Regarding Dartino putting on hold, what will become experimental features
like Processes and Isolates
<https://github.com/dartino/sdk/wiki/Processes-and-Isolates> or Coroutines
and Fibers <https://github.com/dartino/sdk/wiki/Coroutines-and-Fibers> ? Is
there a chance they go back in the standard Dart SDK ?

Cheers,
Alexandre

['Bob Nystrom' via Dart Misc]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 11:39 PM, Alexandre Ardhuin <

Is there a chance they go back in the standard Dart SDK ?

There aren't any plans to that I'm aware of. We're mostly focused on Dart
for the web, where those would be quite hard to support, and Flutter, which
so far hasn't asked for any interesting concurrency features.

Cheers!

– bob

[krupal shah]

It's about the end of 2016. When can we expect Dart 2.0 getting released?
Will it have any features regarding easy and productive concurrency?

Post by 'Bob Nystrom' via Dart Misc

Is there a chance they go back in the standard Dart SDK ?

There aren't any plans to that I'm aware of. We're mostly focused on Dart
for the web, where those would be quite hard to support, and Flutter, which
so far hasn't asked for any interesting concurrency features.
Cheers!
– bob

[Filipe Morgado]

I don't know anything about the reasoning behind the dropping of Dartino.
I can only comment on what it looks like to me, on the outside.

I always thought it was too premature to launch Dartino, when there was so
many loose ends in the Dart platform.
And now that there's AoT compilation for ARM and that Fuchsia is coming,
there's a lot of overlap.
Dartino runs on FreeRTOS I believe, which is pretty much what
Fuchsia/Magenta are supposed to be.
Why not putting the Dartino team working on AoT compilation for
Flutter/Fuchsia?

Then Dart 2.0 seems on its way. If it bring a lot of new features, that's a
LOT of work.
First there's a lot of experimentation to do. Then the spec must be
written. Then they have to update the VM, observatory, the whole SDK, the
analyzer, dev compiler, dart2js, pub (Dartino would have been another one)
and pretty much every library. And write tools for easy migration.
Then they will probably consult internal/external Dart consumer and maybe
cycle back to experimentation.

So yeah, I'm pretty much happy about the team being refocused.

And I expect to wait at least 3 years for Dart 2.0 to be stable.
It's not that much if it has to wait for Flutter and Fuchsia to be
production-ready.

Post by krupal shah
It's about the end of 2016. When can we expect Dart 2.0 getting released?
Will it have any features regarding easy and productive concurrency? What
does it mean by 'discontinued
<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/dartino-discuss/U3fzZjoOdKg>'
status of Dartino project? Will it happen with Dart as well?

Post by 'Bob Nystrom' via Dart Misc
On Thu, Sep 15, 2016 at 11:39 PM, Alexandre Ardhuin <

Is there a chance they go back in the standard Dart SDK ?

There aren't any plans to that I'm aware of. We're mostly focused on Dart
for the web, where those would be quite hard to support, and Flutter, which
so far hasn't asked for any interesting concurrency features.
Cheers!
– bob

[Joao Pedrosa]

Hi Filipe,

I don't know anything about the reasoning behind the dropping of Dartino.

Post by Filipe Morgado
I can only comment on what it looks like to me, on the outside.

My own take about Dartino is that it was trying to do incremental changes
to a live program instance.
The inspiration came mostly from the Smalltalk of old where you could
change a program while it was
running. Perhaps it could be compared to changing a program while it is
being debugged.

The problem though is that Dartino was really starting from scratch. Also,
it's possible that concurrency,
asynchronous code and so on made matters more difficult for a Dartino
implementation of the Smalltalk
ideas. Dartino had to support more features just to support all of the
standard Dart features, and when it
did not, it is possible that folks started to lose interest in it. For
example, Dart was fast while Dartino was
not. But Dartino did use less memory and could start up much faster.
Dartino could start in a few
milliseconds. Only Perl can start that quickly and that may have been one
of the reasons that Perl got
used for CGI on the web. Nowadays though, servers can serve many concurrent
requests and stay up
all the time. Kind of negating the need for a much faster start up as far
as servers go. We can generally
wait for a script to take 100ms to do its job too when starting up from
scratch. Heck, JavaScript code can
take half a second just being parsed by the browser.

I do think that in terms of a scripting language, that starting from
scratch may be advantageous. And Dart
can load a script fast enough, for example.

In JavaScript they go one step further sometimes by using something like a
Webpack server that stays
up all the time and that notices changes and updates the browser
accordingly in "real time." This is in
part a result of JavaScript's dynamic roots and the browser's dynamic APIs.
Webpack for example can
handle files individually and do all kinds of transformations to them:
JavaScript, images, CSS and so on.
So in a way, JavaScript already gets some of the results that Dartino
promised. Pub also did support
some transformations in Dart. Pub was on its way to becoming an alternative
to Webpack. :-)

Dartino also had FFI features that could have been used for accessing
native libraries, even if that may
have made it more platform dependent. Dartino could for example access all
of the Linux syscalls, just
like Go has them. Actually Go does its job of accessing syscalls via FFI
while maintaining cross-platform
support.


Cheers,
Joao

[DoHyung Kim]

What about the FFI then? It is Dart VM specific and might benefit it by
letting it easily leverage native codes.
The current FFI is functionally complete but calling into native codes
without writing any native codes is a huge win.
Even JVM is trying to make FFI easier than the current JNI.

Post by 'Bob Nystrom' via Dart Misc

Is there a chance they go back in the standard Dart SDK ?

There aren't any plans to that I'm aware of. We're mostly focused on Dart
for the web, where those would be quite hard to support, and Flutter, which
so far hasn't asked for any interesting concurrency features.
Cheers!
– bob

[Günter Zöchbauer]

Processes and isolates or coroutines and fibers weren't mentioned here but
it seems related anyway https://plus.google.com/s/dartino/top (check the
comments)

Post by Alexandre Ardhuin
Hi all,
Regarding Dartino putting on hold, what will become experimental features
like Processes and Isolates
<https://github.com/dartino/sdk/wiki/Processes-and-Isolates> or Coroutines
and Fibers <https://github.com/dartino/sdk/wiki/Coroutines-and-Fibers> ?
Is there a chance they go back in the standard Dart SDK ?
Cheers,
Alexandre