Dev News: Dart 3 Meets Wasm, Flutter 3.10, and Qwik ‘Streamable JavaScript’
Google released Dart 3 this week, with the big news being it is now a 100% sound null-safe language and the first preview of Dart to WebAssembly compilation.
“With 100% null safety in Dart, we have a sound type system,” wrote Michael Thomsen, the product manager working on Dart and Flutter. “You can trust that if a type says a value isn’t null, then it never can be null. This avoids certain classes of coding errors, such as null pointer exceptions. It also allows our compilers and runtimes to optimize code in ways it couldn’t without null safety.”
The trade-off, he acknowledged, is that migrations became a bit harder. However, 99% of the top 1000 packages on pub.dev support null safety, so Google expects the “vast majority of packages and apps that have been migrated to null safety” will work with Dart 3. For those who do experience problems using the Dart 3 SDK, there’s a Dart 3 migration guide.
Thomsen also announced a first preview of Dart to WebAssembly compilation. Flutter, which is written in Dart, already uses Wasm, he added.
“We’ve long had an interest in using Wasm to deploy Dart code too, but we’ve been blocked. Dart, like many other object-oriented languages, uses garbage collection,” he wrote. “Over the past year, we’ve collaborated with several teams across the Wasm ecosystem to add a new WasmGC feature to the WebAssembly standard. This is now near-stable in the Chromium and Firefox browsers.”
Compiling Dart to Wasm modules will help achieve high-level goals for web apps, including faster load times; better performance because Wasm modules are low-level and closer to machine code; and semantic consistency.
“For example, Dart web currently differs in how numbers are represented,” he wrote. “With Wasm modules, we’d be able to treat the web like a ‘native’ platform with semantics similar to other native targets.”
Also in Dart 3, Google added records, patterns and modifiers. The language quest for multiple return values was Dart’s fourth highest-rated issue, and by adding records, developers can “build up structured data with nice and crisp syntax,” Thomsen noted.
“In Dart, records are a general feature,” he stated. “They can be used for more than function return values. You also store them in variables, put them into a list, use them as keys in a map, or create records containing other records.”
Records simplify how you build up structured data, he continued, while not replacing using classes for more formal type hierarchies.
Patterns come into play when developers might want to break that structured data into its individual elements to work with them. Patterns shine when used in a switch statement, he explained. While Dart has had limited support for switch, in Dart 3, they’ve broadened the power and expressiveness of the switch statement.
“We now support pattern matching in these cases. We’ve removed the need for adding a break at the end of each case. We also support logical operators to combine cases,” he wrote.
Google also added class modifiers for fine-grained access control for classes.
“Unlike records and patterns that we expect every Dart developer to use, this is more of a power-user feature. It addresses the needs of Dart developers crafting large API surfaces or building enterprise-class apps,” Thomsen stated. “Class modifiers enable API authors to support only a specific set of capabilities. The defaults remain unchanged though. We want Dart to remain simple and approachable.”
Flutter v3.10 Released
Since Flutter is built on Dart, and Dart 3 launched this week, it’s not surprising that Google also launched Flutter version 3.10 at its Google I/O event Wednesday. It was buried in the slew of news announcements, but fortunately, more details were available in a blog post by Kevin Chisholm, Google’s technical program manager for Dart and Flutter.
Flutter 3.10 includes improvements to web, mobile, graphics and security. The framework now compiles with Supply Chain Levels for Software Artifacts (SLSA) Level 1, which adds more security features such:
- Scripted build process, which now allows for automated builds on trusted build platforms;
- Multi-party approval with audit logging, in which all executions create auditable log records; and
- Provenance, with each release publishing links to view and verify provenance on the SDK archive.
This is also the first step toward SLA L2 and L3 compliance, which focus on protecting artifacts during and after the build process, Chisholm explained.
When it comes to the web, there are a number of new changes, including improved load times for web apps because the release reduces the file size of icon fonts and pruned unused glyphs from Material and Cupertino. Also reduced in size: the CanvasKit for all browsers, which should further improve performance.
It also now supports element embedding, which means developers can serve Flutter web apps from a specific element in a page. Previously, apps could either take up the entire page or display within an iframe tag.
The engine Impeller on iOS was tested in the 3.7 stable release, but with v3.10 it’s now set as the default renderer on iOS, which should translate into “less bank and better consistent performance,” Chisholm wrote. Actually, eliminating jank is a big part of this release: Chisholm thanks open source contributor luckysmg, who discovered that it was possible to slash the time to get the next drawable layer from the Metal drive.
“To get that bonus, you need to set the FlutterViews background color to a non-nil value,” he explained. “This change eliminates low frame rates on recent iOS 120Hz displays. In some cases, it triples the frame rate. This helped us close over half a dozen GitHub issues. This change held such significance that we backported a hotfix into the 3.7 release.”
Among the other lengthy list of improvements are the ability to decode APNG images, improved image loading APIs and support for wireless debugging.
Quick v1.0: A Full-Stack Framework with ‘Streaming JavaScript’
Qwik, a full-stack web framework, reached version 1.0 this week, with the Quick team promising a “fundamentally new approach to delivering instant apps at scale.”
The open source JavaScript framework draws inspiration from React, Cue, Angular, Svelte, SolidJS and their meta frameworks — think Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit — according to the post announcing the new release. Qwik promises to provide the same strengths as these frameworks while adapting for scalability.
“As web applications get large, their startup performance degrades because current frameworks send too much JavaScript to the client. Keeping the initial bundle size small is a never-ending battle that’s no fun, and we usually lose,” the Qwik team wrote. “Qwik delivers instant applications to the user. This is achieved by keeping the initial JavaScript cost constant, even as your application grows in complexity. Qwik then delivers only the JavaScript for the specific user interaction.”
The result is that the JavaScript doesn’t “overwhelm” the browser even as the app becomes larger. It’s like streaming for JavaScript, they added.
To that end, Qwik solves for instant loading time with JavaScript streaming, speculative code fetching, lazy execution, optimized rendering time and data fetching, to name a few of the benefits listed in the post.
It also incorporates ready-to-use integrations with poplar libraries and frameworks, the post noted. Qwik also includes adapters for Azure, Cloudflare, Google Cloud Run, Netlify, Node.js, Deno and Vercel.
