Dartium: Google's New Dart Programming Language Comes to Chromium

Dartium: Google's New Dart Programming Language Comes to Chromium

It's only been a few months since Google announced its new Dart programming language. While the language is still going through some major revisions, though, Chromium, the open-source project behind Google's Chrome browser, is now starting to integrate Dart into its platform with the release of "Dartium" version of the browser for Mac and Linux.  It will likely take a while before Dart finds its way into mainstream Chrome releases, but the team also today announced that the long-term plan is to include the Dart virtual machine in Chrome.

While Google also offers the ability to compile Dart programs to JavaScript, which is supported in every modern browser, a native virtual machine makes executing applications written in Dart faster.

Google designed Dart to be a flexible programming language for the web that would be fast, easy to learn for programmers and work across all major modern browsers. There has been quite some interest for Dart in the developer community, though the language is obviously still too immature to be used in a production environment. Other browser developers, who are worried about fragmentation and adding support for yet another language to their software, haven't shown a lot of interest in adding support for Dart.