A somewhat subjective shorty. Sitting in front of my screen, after having a couple of drinks with friends, I’m catching up with the developments of the past week.

Dart 2.3 is around the corner! Usually, a minor release isn’t that exciting and a lot of people tend to write about the new language features.

spread operators

collection if

collection for

To me, the more exciting part is the optics of these features.

For a good while, we’ve been getting a lot of value in releases. However, most of those changes were behind the scenes.

Before Dart 2.0, a lot of effort went into writing CFE (Common Front-End) — started at the end of 2016 Prepping for Dart 2.0 Insane amount of work around the type system, making it sound Upgrading libs to Dart 2 Tightening type system Performance optimizations in Dart 2.1 …

I am sure, I missed some big ones but maybe it’s enough to recognize a pattern. These were all necessary to have a language, runtime, SDK and strong foundation on top of which the team can build more quickly.

Now, we can read in the changelog:

Flutter is growing rapidly, which means many Dart users are building UI in code out of big deeply-nested expressions. Our goal with 2.3.0 was to make that kind of code easier to write and maintain

I wonder, is this the time, that we — end-users — start seeing the benefits of this multi-year effort? Could changes like this one become more common? I dream of language features, tools, FFI, dart2js upgrades.

End of rant, thanks for the read! :)