The road to Dart 3: A fully sound, null safe language

[JN]

On Thursday, 8 December 2022 at 18:03:11 UTC, ryuukk_ wrote:
> https://medium.com/dartlang/the-road-to-dart-3-afdd580fbefa
>
> Some interesting takes, reminds me of Python 3.0
>
> I figured it would be interesting to share
>
> - Breaking Changes
>
> - Null Safety
>
> - Pattern Matching
>
> - Macros
>
> - WASM
>

Interesting. Dart is one of my favorite programming languages 
(except for D of course), and it's my go-to language whenever 
doing anything related because I can't stomach Javascript and 
never really tried Typescript much. However the null safety 
features I found to be an annoyance. Same with other languages, I 
feel like I am fighting the language and just explicitly 
declaring types as nullable or forcing dereference wherever 
possible. Sure, you will not get a null pointer exception, but in 
case a null happens, parts of your code will just not execute 
silently. Maybe I am missing something but I was never sold on 
the null safety angle.

Patterns look interesting. Dart doesn't have structs, so 
implementing basic datatypes like pairs was a pain and overly 
verbose. Pattern matching on class dynamic type is interesting. 
One might say it's an anti-pattern, on the other hand it's a 
pattern similar to visitor pattern, just without the usual 
boilerplate.

Macros may be a big feature. Currently Dart relies on code 
generation, which comes with a lot of boilerplate code and still 
requires maintenance. With macros, if you could 
serialize/deserialize classes without any extra code, it would be 
a big improvement.