Dart is the one easy to learn language that has been acting like an underdog ever since its launch. While Google has been using it for developing its crucial and highly invested in AdWords application, its mass adoption was never highlighted.

However, ever since the real strategy behind the launch and promotion of Flutter (Google’s cross platform app development SDK) has come into the limelight, a whole new focus has been shifted to Dart, which is the language that Flutter is based on.

In this article, we will be looking into the reasons that are making Dart popular now, ever since Flutter was announced and how with its features, the language has ensured its place in the most used programming languages.

Here are the Dart features that makes the language an ideal companion for Flutter app development -

Dart is compiled Ahead Of Time for delivering a predictable, fast, native code, which enables every component to be written in Dart. The fact that the whole app can be written in just one language, makes the development process faster and allows everything including the widgets to be customized.

Dart is also compiled Just In Time for stunningly fast development process and revolutionary workflow, which includes Flutter’s famous sub-second hot reload state.

Dart makes it extremely easy to create smooth transitions and animations, which run at the speed of 60 FPS. The language can do garbage collection and object allocation without any locks. And just like JavaScript, it avoids shared memory and the preemptive scheduling (thus locks). Because Flutter apps are compiled with a native code, they do not need a slow bridge in between the realms. They even start up a lot faster.

Because Dart’s programmatic, declarative layout is very easy to visualize and read, Dart enables Flutter to ignore the need for an individual declarative layout language such as XML or JSX, or different visual interface builders. And because the language of all the layouts are same and in a single place, it is convenient for Flutter to offer advanced tooling which makes layout a snap.

Mobile App Developers find it easy to develop using Dart as the language is extremely easy to learn because of its similarity with both dynamic and static languages.

There are a number of other features, besides these, that are making the developers take the Dart route.

Although Dart is yet to see its fair share in the sun, the preparations to make it one of the most used and widely accepted languages, are complete. And Google has already set its popularity backdrop in Google I/O 2018. There are a number of tools in the Dart group that make it easy for developers to work around and develop innovative mobile apps in. Some of those enabling features are -

IDEs — WebStorm from JetBrains and Dart Editor from Google

Dart2js — It is a Dart-to-JavaScript tree-shaker and a compiler, which eliminates all the unused codes from the third-party libraries that are used in the mobile application development process.

Pub — It is a development server, dependency management, and a build tool.

Gulp — This a task manager. It is the analog for Gradle or Grunt. We make use of gulp for preparing to optimize the ready-to-deploy applications from the code that is generated in the pub build. In specificity, we make use of gulp to do gzip compression.

Dartium — It is an internet Browser for Dart developers. Like Google Chrome is foundationed on open source project known as Chromium, Dartium is Chromium that has a built-in DartVM. It is used for launching and then debugging mobile and desktop apps.

Dump-Info Visualizer — It allows the examination of generated JavaScript. It allows an extremely convenient breakdown with the app’s JavaScript code, making it possible to analyze the file sizes and then determine the scripts that are to be optimized.

Observatory — It is a Dart profiler

AngularDart framework — It is the port of a famous JavaScript framework — AngularJS.

All these tools and the features that Dart comes loaded with makes it an extremely easy to employ language. The fact that the learning curve is almost next to invisible also makes it beneficial for the developers to adapt to it for all their cross platform and cross device application development needs.

Have you started using Dart yet? Let us know your experience or opinion in the comments below.