Google Announces Dart Support for App Engine and Future Development Plans

At the recent I/O developer conference, Google quietly announced that it is working to bring its Dart programming language to App Engine as soon as possible.

The implementation is based on the company's newly launched managed VMs and custom runtime support for the service. However, because the custom runtime is still in internal testing, the Dart team cannot open it to the public yet, although Google revealed several related features at the conference.

Most developers view Dart as a JavaScript replacement. This perception is reasonable since Dart targets similar use cases and Google provides a Chrome browser with an integrated Dart VM, a Dart‑to‑JavaScript compiler, and many other tools. Yet the ambition behind Dart goes far beyond that, so it is not surprising that the team wants to run the language on App Engine and other servers.

The author interviewed Lars Bak and Kasper Lund, the Danish creators of Dart (Bak also developed Google’s V8 engine). They explained that the original idea behind Dart was to create a general‑purpose language, not merely a JavaScript variant, aiming for a dynamically typed language that is easy to learn and boosts developer productivity.

Consequently, the Dart team focuses on making the language approachable and providing tools that help developers work efficiently, such as the Dart Editor IDE, a large ecosystem of libraries, and a Chrome browser on Android that integrates Dart. The team also demonstrated seamless collaboration between Dart and Google’s web component framework Polymer, as well as Dart’s latest Material Design UI language.

Google announced that developers can use Docker to deploy Dart to its Compute Engine infrastructure, and support for App Engine will follow, allowing easier access to Google’s Datastore, monitoring, and caching services.

Another eagerly awaited development is Chrome’s integration of Dart. When asked about this, Bak smiled and indicated that more news will be released soon. Integrated Dart support in Chrome would be a major leap, as the Dart‑to‑JavaScript compiler already works well, but the Dart VM offers significantly higher execution efficiency, which should further motivate developers to adopt Dart.

Looking ahead, Bak mentioned that the team is exploring how to add async/await‑style asynchronous features to Dart, similar to JavaScript.

After releasing Dart 1.0, the team began working on an ECMA standard for Dart, analogous to the ECMA‑Script standard for JavaScript. Bak noted that creating a good language standard is crucial, and now the team seeks to attract other industry players to adopt Dart in their browsers.

The Dart team believes that using a single language for both front‑end and back‑end development will lead to more stable code and smoother collaboration among development teams.