Comparing JavaScript with Dart in 2019
Okay, I get it what you already know. You thought you could make web-apps, server-side applications, desktop, or even mobile applications with the legendary JavaScript language right? Well, you might be wrong there. Fast forward to 2019, and we have a (not-so-new) language that can do most of the above stuff with greater ease and efficiency. Hello Dart 🎯! Well, the competition seems head-to-head. Let’s see how these two programming languages compare with each other in 2019.
What’s the need for JavaScript in 2019?
If you ever ask this question to anyone, you’ll mostly get “Why not? We all need JS every year!”. Quite true. Before I dive into this year, let’s take a look back. In the year 2018, the developer community of Stackoverflow conducted their annual developer survey. Here, you can clearly see that JavaScript was the Most Popular Technology among both the professional and regular developers. Taking a look into this data only, we can surely say that JavaScript will rise more this year. I mean, 69.8% is quite good for a single language. Also, if you take a look into the popular website Paysa, it clearly says that
The average Salary for Salaried Employees who know Javascript is $128,132.
That’s also quite a remarkable digits according to a developer’s skill level for the career. No doubt, JavaScript is thumping everywhere! Just see the stats at the State of JS. Okay, enough of this previous year stuff, let’s come back to where we are today. Hello, 2019 👋!
If you’re new to this exciting world of programming, then it will be easy for me to tell you that you can start learning and writing your first program in JavaScript. Wait. You may also hear that, no, Python is now preferred over JavaScript to start for a programmer. That’s not wrong at all. You can choose either of the two but here we’re talking about only two languages, JavaScript and Dart! You can skim through this language and be open to multiple opportunities. Some of these ‘opportunities’ are:
- Web development:- You knew it already. Well, JavaScript is so much popular and demanding to work in the web development world that it races before all the other languages that are used to code for the web. Be it the front-end development to create a simple dice game using Vanilla JS, or creating a shopping cart web application with famous frameworks like Vue or Angular. And yes, don’t forget the React library too! JavaScript, I say, can do everything you put at it. Of course, this was possible due to coming up of the open-source land of contributors who made it possible to develop new libraries and frameworks. Not only in the front-end department where you see quirky illustrations, soothing animations and wonderful designs of the webpage, but JavaScript is also equally powerful for that logical stuff that runs in the server-side i.e. back-end development. Take a look at Node JS, Express JS, Common JS, they all need JavaScript to write the server-side code to fetch API requests and what not.
- Mobile development:- To write applications for our smartphones, JavaScript had made it easy. You can build high-quality native apps without worrying to write or learn another language. All you need is to learn the basic concepts of JavaScript and some framework specific tools. You might have heard of React Native. That’s the most popular JavaScript framework to make mobile apps all thanks to the developers at Facebook. Apart from this, JavaScript is heavily used in other mobile-based frameworks like Meteor JS, NativeScript and PhoneGap. The best part is that most of them are cross-platform so you write code once, they will take care of it running in Android or iOS.
- Desktop application development:- Yes, desktop too! You have Electron JS for that. Looks like for everything to develop we have “something JS”. How cool is this that you write some HTML and CSS to structure and style the desktop application components and then just by knowing JavaScript you apply the functioning and it compiles into a file that can be run as an application for both Windows and MacOS!
- Game development:- JavaScript doesn’t stop here too! If you know this language, you can take advantage of frameworks like Phaser and engines like Pixi JS to make a fully-featured game you like. There’s no doubt that Unity and Unreal Engine are used professionally around the globe but why learn new languages or tools when you can do all of that in just one language! Also, I see you love JS, don’t you 😉? That’s a lot of time-saving for you and your team.
Well, if you just thought JavaScript is about game, desktop, mobile and web app development, you might be wrong here. This language goes all the way from IoT to Machine Learning and back to Robotics. You can train machine models in the browser using TensorFlow JS and use the Cyclon JS framework to change the lighting color of Philips Hue. Sweet.
I’m sure most of you must have guessed by now that this year too will be JavaScript dominated year. If that’s the case then Dart just came to tickle your funny bone 👻.
What’s the need for Dart in 2019?
It’s clear from the above discussion that when it comes to anything related to the website’s client-side or even server-side development, JavaScript sits there like a king 👑. One might think that this ‘king’ has some of its negatives and can be possibly replaced by a new ‘king’ that might just be that one person who came from nowhere but has a solid taste in ruling both the client-side and server-side of development. Whatever I wrote above is not just thoughts, this has happened already!
So, if you need a solid alternative to JavaScript then you really need to welcome the Dart programming language with open arms 👐. It’s not the newest language in the market. It first appeared in 2011 and Google announced its stable release in 2017. Dart may not be popular back then, but now if you do a few searches about it, you will see that you can do almost the same stuff as you would do with JavaScript with ease! At the start of this year, JAXenter created a poll about “which programming languages are on your list for 2019?” And, the results showed that Dart was given the highest percentage of votes. Quick note: the second was not JavaScript but Python. There are many features of Dart which makes it a really cool programmer friendly language to learn this year, here are some of those:
- Fully object-oriented:- Just like JavaScript, this one too relies on objects. If you love those OOPs concepts just like me, then you will love Dart too! And as a bonus, you get support for interfaces, mixins, abstract classes, reified generics, and static typing.
- Easy to learn:- No coder wants to give themselves a headache by learning a new programming language which will take years to understand its concepts. Dart has a very short learning curve. The syntax is easy to understand and will remind you of C and JavaScript in between 😊. You just need to learn a few of its concepts thoroughly and boom! you never know when you made your first project!
- Super portable:- No need to look out for a specific hardware configuration or architecture to run this language. It can be run in any operating system. Applications written in pure Dart can run in most of the major mobile operating systems and the web applications will run in any browser.
- High productivity:- Everyone needs more work to be done in a short period of time. This is where Dart excels. From its syntax to its working behind-the-scenes, everything is developed to increase developer’s productivity so that even the complex tasks can be solved with ease. Even if you find something that the language is not capable to do on its own, then you have it’s large collection of libraries and packages on its official platform.
- One language, many platforms:- Of course you write once and it will be executed on different platforms with ease. Name anything, be it a mobile app, a web app, a desktop app, some server-side/client-side work, scripting work, Dart handles them all ⚡!
And guess what, when you write the Dart code, it will always compile the code both in Ahead of Time (AOT) and Just in Time (JIT). That simply means, you are writing the code and Dart is simultaneously compiling and executing it in the background and you get real time results. No more waiting to compile!
It’s about numbers!
Let’s compare both of these languages together with some statistics.
According to the website Stackshare, JavaScript has 31.1K fans, 15K jobs available and 7.24K votes given. In contrast to this, Dart is ridiculously low on this. Just look at this, 283 fans, 91 jobs, and 125 votes. Hah. Now, obviously, these numbers don’t matter that much but it gives us a rough idea about the usage of both the languages right now.
Why developers choose JavaScript or Dart?
When asked “Why do you use JavaScript for your projects?”, developers usually tend to answer these:
- “It can be used on both front-end and back-end”
- “It’s used everywhere!”
- “It comes with lots of great and popular frameworks”
- “It’s fast, light-weight and flexible”
- “You can’t run a device which doesn’t use JavaScript today!”
As for the Dart, they say:
- “It’s more trust-worthy as it’s backed by Google”
- “It runs twice the speed of JavaScript”
- “It’s quite scalable across projects”
- “It’s like Java”
- “It’s used extensively for the Flutter mobile UI framework”
But why you should not use JavaScript or Dart?
Well, there are downsides of both. Let’s see what are they. You should not use JavaScript because:
- Not good client-side security: What if a malicious website loads on your browser? That code will run and may harm your device in one way or other. Solution? Disable JavaScript :(
- One error can cause the entire website to stop loading.
- No multithreading support.
As for the Dart programming language, here are some points:
- A really small ecosystem of libraries and packages when compared with JavaScript.
- It has a single object paradigm i.e. classes. Nothing else.
- “You cannot rename the function without writing another assignment statement”. This is nicely explained by Chris Khoo in his Gist.
Which tools integrate with both the languages🛠?
For JavaScript, it’s pretty simple and you might be using many of these on a regular basis. Here are some big names:
- Auth0: A token-based sign-up tool for your apps or APIs.
- Yarn: A package manager and a good alternative to NPM.
- Gatsby JS: An open-source framework to build websites or apps with React JS at a faster rate.
- Parcel: A fast web application bundler.
- ESLint: A popular JavaScript linter.
- Azure Cosmos DB: Microsoft’s globally distributed database service.
- Algolia: An API for building search results.
- Lodash: A library which provides utility functions for common programming tasks.
- CircleCI: A popular continuous integration and delivery platform.
- Jetpack: It wraps webpack to create a smoother developer experience.
For Dart, it looks like it really needs to pump up its game. Take a look:
- Flutter: The cross-platform mobile UI framework by Google.
- Aqueduct: Multi-threaded server-side framework.
- Dart Webdev: A framework to build web apps with Google’s services integration.
- AngularDart: Another popular alternative to Dart Webdev.
Although you might be aware only about Flutter and Angular Dart, it’s nice to see that more and more Dart frameworks and libraries are coming up over time.
Who is currently using these languages?
As you can guess from the above discussion about tools, it’s quite obvious that more companies are using JavaScript over Dart. Still, you might want to take a look who these companies are.
Companies using JavaScript:
- 9GAG
- Square
- Airbnb
Companies using Dart:
- Blossom
- Adobe
- Health Dynamics
- Soundtrap
Where to next 🤔?
If you are new to any of the two languages and want to dive deeper into the beautiful world of programming with either JavaScript or Dart, then here are some resources I recommend:
JavaScript
Dart
Some alternatives?
Let’s assume, you tried to master one of these languages but couldn’t catch up. You want to develop your very own personal website with the help of a language similar to JavaScript. Or, you want to write some server-side code but don’t want to code in Dart. In that case, you can consider these alternatives:
JavaScript alternatives:
Dart alternatives:
Note: All the above content is taken from the web. I did not do the research :) I just showed you the results! This topic is quite debatable 😉
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