Google today announced the first beta release of its Dart SDK and Editor, including performance and productivity improvements across the platform. You can download the latest version of Dart now from dartlang.org.

The Editor’s analysis engine, responsible for reporting warnings and errors, has been completely rewritten. According to Google, it is now 20 percent faster at parsing and analyzing. Furthermore, there’s no need to run all the unit tests just to discover a typo as the Dart Editor keeps track of everything as you type.

Here it is in action:

Deploying a Dart app is now also easier thanks to the new beta pub deploy command, available from the Dart Editor or the pub command-line utility. It creates a directory with your app’s code and assets and prepares it for hosting on your Web server.

As for performance, Google says that compared to the previous M4 release, the benchmark tool DeltaBlue shows a 33 percent speed improvement and Tracer shows a 40 percent jump. Today’s release also includes full SIMD acceleration in Dart VM.

Code completion has also been improved: it is now camelcase aware (for example, typing “iE” will suggest “isEmpty”). Most importantly, however, compiling Dart to JavaScript now results in even smaller code (up to 3.7 times smaller than previous compilation sizes for some Dart programs that use reflection and HTML).

Dart Editor now also includes the following additional features (full release notes here):

“Rename Library” refactoring.

“Convert Method to Getter” and “Convert Getter to Method” refactorings.

“Import Library” quick fix.

“Create Class” and “Create part” quick fixes.

For those who don’t know, Dart is Google’s open-source Web programming language. Dart’s ultimate goal is to replace JavaScript – not exactly something that can happen overnight. In the meantime, Google seems content with offering better performance, scaling for large projects, more security features, and slowly building out its alternative to make it easier for developers to manage an evolving app.

Top Image Credit: Asif Akbar

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