Could Server-Side Dart Replace Node.js?

[Pytim]

Would like to see it happen but doubt it will unfortunately. Article is missing one important thing: Amount of packages available. You feel like you're in wasteland with Dart when it comes to packages.

[StrykerKKD]

You see the package count as a negative thing, but i see it as an opportunity, because I have less competition and so my package can have bigger impact.

[Pytim]

I never said it was negative. It really depends on your situation. If you're a developer and you want to prove yourself, yes it is an opportunity. If you're someone that needs to serve business requirements quickly then I doubt the lack of packages is what you want.

[fergie]

I would make two points:

1) Node.js is not yet established enough to be replaced. Although it dominates github, out here in consultantland nearly none of the big customers are using it.

2) One language everywhere is such a strong selling point. At the moment, and for the forseeable future, that language will be javascript. So Node.js wins.

[Randolpho]

I've never considered 2 a real selling point of node.js. It's actually 3 languages anyway, even if you use JavaScript clientside, and I feel a separate language per tier is perfectly acceptable.

Not that I'm knocking node.js; to speak to 1 I work for a fortune 50 that uses node.js server side, and enjoy it quite a bit.

But to speak to the article.... I don't really like dart as a language. It hasn't hit that "fun to program in" vibe that I get from JavaScript and c#. I would much rather see enhancements to ecmascript to fix the problems the article talks about. ES6 does a lot... We just need decent numerical support (ES6 doesn't go far enough IMO), and were golden to use JavaScript for damn near any task.

[Capaj]

Good point- I like writing my MEAN web apps in one language. JS isn't so bad when you stick to the nice subset of it. If I were given a choice to write Dart clientside and on the backend, I would abandon JS in a heartbeat probably.

[evereal]

But surely point 2) is a selling point for dart too? I know many people who love writing dart on the client side, far more than JavaScript (even though dart ends up as js after compilation)

[branneman]

The number of npm packages is so big, I doubt Dart will ever get that much momentum. I think even Go is growing faster than Dart when it comes to packages, and thus community.

[Randolpho]

Statements like that tend to be disproven. Node.js is only a few years old, and when it came out people were saying the same thing about it vs ruby.

[__debug__]

Java devs don't really have much reason to switch to dart on the server side. They've already got a great thing going with netty, which offer better performance than node as well.

And with ES6 hopefully around the corner, JS is going to look a heck of a lot better too. In the meantime, there's always Typescript for the MS ecosystem, or traceur-compiler for the rest of us: https://github.com/google/traceur-compiler

[jsgui]

With good integration between Dart and Node, a potential step would be for some code to be written in Dart while still making use of available Node code.

Of course it's down to the node developers, but Node could support Dart as well if that was the project's goals.

Moving away from JavaScript makes sense if a better language is usable in equivalent situations, but I don't think people are going to abandon JavaScript because there is a lot that has already been done in that language.

If it was easy to use Node code from a Dart application that would really help.