walled garden? ActiveX? your comment is pure FUD. dart is as open as possible - open source, open standard etc' etc'.

This is a genuine attempt to make the web better - I'm definitely supporting it.

> This is a genuine attempt to make the web better

Better for Google that is.

Better for users also (and yes, better for Google because Google makes money when people see and click ads on the web).

When the web has more interesting content being produced by more motivated developers, users win. When the web starts up faster, users and vendors win. When pages and apps run much quickly on the web, users and vendors win.

>Microsoft tried this with ActiveX. Deja-vu, all over again.

And Netscape (Mozilla's grandaddy) tried it with Javascript.

You know, the then proprietary to their browser technology that we now use as a standard. What "works best in X" can eventually be an adopted standard given time.

That said, your analogy is also flawed in another way. Active X was faulty technologically (insecure), proprietary and closed source.

Dart is better than JS architecturally, is open source, AND is passing through a standards body for standardization.

So no relation to Active X at all.

> And Netscape (Mozilla's grandaddy) tried it with Javascript.

> You know, the then proprietary to their browser technology that we now use as a standard. What "works best in X" can eventually be an adopted standard given time.

While true, everyone agrees that was the wrong way to go and suggesting that we repeat that mistake is... a mistake.

Except that ActiveX works only in Windows. The finance dept where I work all need Windows VMs to access this one website that won't work on OS X.

Dart is more Visual Basic than ActiveX.

NaCl is the second coming of ActiveX.

Dart would be VBScript if VBScript compiled to JavaScript, and the compiler was released well before the native implementation landed in IE.

VBScript would have compiled to javascript if MS had needed it to.

I fully agree with you.

I will only touch Dart when it is natively supported in major browsers or required by our customers.

Why wait for the VM when you can compile to JavaScript today?

Because customers only request JavaScript and I don't want to debug code generated from tools.

Have you tried to use source maps to help debugging? Plenty of compile-to-JavaScript languages support source maps, and even some CSS frameworks. Building complex/large apps without a compiler and tools is really difficult. GWT, Closure, TypeScript, Dart are all efforts to help developers build more interesting apps that scale. Building/compiling is just a natural step in the process, and source maps are a natural output of that process.

As I repeated here multiple times:

- customers request JavaScript written by humans, not tools. As it makes them easier to get "resources"

- source maps are only an option on a few desktop browsers, no fun testing generated JavaScript on specific browser issues

Debugging of generated code has gotten leaps and bounds better in the past few years though.

True for the desktop, when targeting certain browser versions, though.

Yes, your damping down of the excitement is 100% correct.