I tried to contribute to a couple of official Dart web projects.

It was extremely poorly handled by the Angular Dart team and I learned the hard way that the “source code open to public” != “open source, contributions welcome”.

I really wanted to use Dart over the JS ecosystem (it’s similar to TypeScript syntactically but with a package manager that’s not npm and none of the JS implementation baggage!) but the project is very clearly catering to internal customers at google with 0 care for any sort of community.

I should emphasize that all my contributions were fixes and not some sort of feature requests - the latter would be straight up impossible to discuss I am sure.

Good luck to both the Dart VM and Flutter team - solid engineering from what I can see, just a pity that community management was shit and put me off unless I get paid to work with them.

I do wonder why Google doesn't take a more open, community approach to Dart. I mean, what do they have to lose?

As a Googler said earlier, they've built the fundamentals quasi-privately already, do it seems they can only win by making it a community project.

Is it any less community driven than Swift though?

You’re right they have the infrastructure almost all in place. I wish they did care about the community especially when communities like Go really are thriving.

I do not have any experiences with how the Swift project is run, hoping someone else sees this and comments!

Well, having it as the language for Flutter will obviously only help in both regards.

https://flutter.io/platform-channels/ is intended to make it easy to integrate with many existing "native" (OEM-side) third-party libraries.

There's also a surprisingly large number of pure Dart packages. See pub.dartlang.org.

Set of C# libraries is nothing compared to number of libraries in Java or Python, is that a reason to hate C#?

Look at this from different perspective, you have a chance to start one of the future most popular library in Dart.

It IS a factor.

Many people choose Python because of the libraries available.

Many developers just want to ride the wave, not innovate.

there's nothing innovative about rolling auth flow yet again.

C# has everything that an average project needs. With Dart you'd need to reinvent the wheel several times for something common as medium-size mobile game.

I need good support for OpenCV and other image/color manipulation libraries. Two years ago C# totally sucked on this so I went with Java. Has it changed?

Nope.

However, it is easy to expose C methods (not entire opencv interface) to your app via PInvoke.

I do this often, and allows me to quickly pop in any native library how I want.

Is that reason enough to hate Dart ?

No, not the language itself. But community involvement is important.