Dart to JVM bytecode compiler(code.google.com) |
Dart to JVM bytecode compiler(code.google.com) |
(This sort of goes off the topic, sorry)
It sort of reopens my bewilderment that Dart doesn't already do this, and a lot more. I was expecting the language to be a lot more baked than it actually is and expecting a lot of targets perhaps via an llvm translator.
I realize it is still early days for Dart but as a big fan of haxe (which is similar in the sense that it is an ECMAScript-looking language with a custom VM (neko) and the ability to compile to other languages (not just JS, but php, C++, AVM1/AVM2 (Flash) bytecode, etc), I sort of expected the mighty Google to have more to show.
haxe has a pretty good headstart, for sure, having been around for years, but OTOH until very recently it was pretty much a one man show.
If you start with Java, strip out everything that can't be mapped reasonably well onto JS, and tidy up what's left, then you have something that can be used to build statically typed applications for the web in the manner which Google are used to.
I'm guessing it wouldn't be a good match because Dart is fundamentally closer to a dynamic language than a statically typed language
The similarities to java seem to come from conservatism in language design more than anything else.
1) erase types. All method parameters become Object, all variables become Object.
2) implicitly add an interface to each class for each method type ie classes with String toString(String) get an implicit interface with one method Object toString(Object).
3) implicitly cast from Object to the method-interface type in order to call methods.
That sounds pretty slow, but also not very far from Java. I doubt it would take more than a day to make a prototype .dart to .java source converter that actually worked on JVM.