Dart is really nice to write in, with far less mental overhead than some of its would-be competitors that couldn't possess the same wisdom and foresight at the time of their creation, so an interactive shell for it is pretty cool. In general I think it's slowly trying to carve its place in the world other than Flutter's language (for which many great packages have been made), but it doesn't have any other forefront project or library, and probably still carries a bit of prejudice from the Dartium mayhem and being a language looking for some purpose that could be orphaned by a blind-sighted Google at any time, the Ads story about it still comes up often. I'd like to see it around more.

This is the same author as the awesome flutter rust bridge: https://github.com/fzyzcjy/flutter_rust_bridge

Thanks for everything you've done for the dart community!

Even though I don’t use Dart myself I very much approve of this initiative.

I live in my Python REPL (ipython) and I couldn’t live without my hot reloading without losing state. Allows for hacking about a bit directly in the REPL. Once something starts to take shape you can push it into a file, import it into your REPL then hack about with it in a text editor.

The hot reloading is great when you have a load of state in classes and you can change code in the editor and have that immediately updated on your existing objects in the REPL.

Not strictly related (because it doesn't have a working REPL yet) but may also find ClojureDart of interest.

https://github.com/Tensegritics/ClojureDart

There is so much cool stuff at various stages of landing in the Dart pipeline at the moment. A few things that come to mind include:

1. Dart now supports the native Web platform APIs and offers a really compelling alternative to TypeScript now thanks to their their latest generation of JS interop. Example for how the code looks here: https://github.com/kevmoo/kevmoo.com/blob/main/web/main.dart

2. Compile to WASM now on the web also with future work to also align itself with the emerging WASI standards both as a compile target and the ability to embed WASI runtimes into Dart programs (technically already possible through their C interop)

3. Lots of great work on cross language interop with C, C++, Swift, Rust, Go, JavaScript, Objective C, Kotlin and Java here https://github.com/dart-lang/native

4. Upcoming Macros feature which gives fully static type safe automatic and fully debugable code generation.

5. Potentially looking at bringing Shared Memory Multithreading to the language https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/2662d252b7fa93175...

6. Also some early work on a bytecode compiler it seems but I’ve not seen any kind of announcement about it here https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/tree/main/pkg/dart2bytecode

7. This REPL

It’s really a good time to be a part of the community. It’s a very bright looking future for it.

dart's syntax is very easy to pick up, sadly it's defined as a 'client-side language', instead of a general purpose one, otherwise I would invest more time into it.

while flutter is cross platform I think for the web, WASM is its focus, which I dislike, not sure what JS interop mentioned in the comment here really does. can Dart be compiled to readable JS?

I love repl and I hope more languages implement it.

Didn't Google laid off the flutter team just recently? What sane person would use Dart after that? Almost nobody was using it even before anyway.

Dart, Kotlin, Go. I guess just one of them will survive if any.