The problem isn't with compiled size in general, but with code that uses reflection because it's hard to impossible to tell what code is actually executed one the reflective APIs are called. Angular is highly reflective, and we are still working on ways to reduce the size of Angular apps. The Angular team is working on code generators that remove the reflective bits, and the Dart team is working on annotations and other methods to tell the compiler what code is invoked via mirrors. This work will continue post 1.0.

I'd argue that the size of Javascript output is great and it continues to improve: http://work.j832.com/2013/10/dart-to-javascript-output-size-...

Yes, the situation seems much better than I thought. I didn't realise Angular.dart was unrepresentative.

We've been working with the dart2js team to reduce the size and they have been making incremental improvements. AngularDart is smaller this week than last :-)

Both 170KB and 70.5KB are still pretty huge for trivial apps, though.

Great to hear! Looking forward to giving Dart and AngularDart a go.