It’s used with Flutter, Google’s app development framework. I really enjoy Dart as a language, but it is fairly young and missing a few conveniences (such as data classes). It also can’t compile to dynamic libraries, only executables. Despite that, it is very pleasant if you enjoy managed languages.

I taught myself Dart a couple of years ago, and enjoyed the language, but never found a compelling use for it.

For anything I might do in Dart, there's a better alternative. For backend stuff, I'm going to write in Java or Kotlin. For frontend stuff, I'm going to write in JS or TypeScript. I like Flutter, but Flutter by itself isn't reason enough to adopt Dart.

Long term, if Jetpack for Desktop actually takes off, I don't see any reason to write in anything but Kotlin.

I think there was a fork of Chrome that included Dart as another language runtime alongside JavaScript.

Yep, Dartium. That ship has sailed years ago.

That rings a bell with me. I think is was during the early days of Dart and it was a special Chromium build if memory serves me.

That was Dart 1.0 which I think was weakly typed.

It's used in Flutter exclusively, and since Flutter is hardly used at all, it's a pretty unknown language, and will probably always remain so.

It doesn't help Dart that Kotlin and Swift have been null safe languages for a decade now.

I wouldn’t dismiss Flutter out of hand. It’s more popular even than React Native!

https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/02/21/why-flutter-is-the-mos...

More popular by the metric of...StackOverflow question tags. I'm not sure that I would use that as my preferred metric for language popularity.

Indeed the perfect language/tech stack would be immensely popular and never have any SO questions, as everything would be obvious and easy to figure out without help...

… which is why hairdryers have warnings like “do not use while sleeping”.

I mean…

Not a very meaningful metric.

Take a look at job boards and see how many job postings you find for React compared to Flutter.