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dart-lang
dart_style
Dart2015–2025
dart-lang / dart_style

dart_style

An opinionated formatter/linter for Dart code

Developer Tools
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
3Distinct people
7Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
700GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An opinionated formatter/linter for Dart code

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

I have to say Dartfmt is one of my favorite things about using Dart. It works amazingly well and the fact that it's not configurable is a great decision [0]. I'm never afraid…

korm used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-09-12 00:07:03 UTC to 2025-02-21 09:26:45 UTC.

0122015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

7 sources
Defletter·Feb 21, 2025
As I've said, it's fine for people, projects, and organisations to require and enforce a particular style for their code, to demand consistency for their code. The problem comes when people with inflated egos believe they have the right to dictate how the entire world writes their code. I feel like I need to stress that this is the issue here. The fact that Dart's formatter FAQ tells developers who are unhappy with the output to change their code to satisfy the formatter (https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/wiki/FAQ#i-dont-like...), rather than allowing developers to tweak the formatter to satisfy their code, is such a huge tell about their mindset. And again, these global styles do not "end the discussion" as people in this thread have asserted. The "tall style" PR (https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/issues/1253) refutes that. A
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nd that PR has since devolved into bickering and heated demands since its adoption into SDK 3.7.0, since it transforms people's code in ways they dislike and/or find less readable. Just let people, projects, and organisations enforce their own styles conventions. It's not hard and it shouldn't be controversial.
In Software development topics I've changed my mind on
Defletter·Feb 6, 2025
Vehemently disagree. I get that go's conventions line up with your own, but when they don't, it's irritating. For example, Dart is finally coming around on the "tall" style (https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/issues/1253). But why should people be forced to wait for a committee (or some other lofty institution) to change a style convention that then effects everyone using the language? What's the harm in letting people write their code in the "tall" style beforehand? Why must the formatter be so insistent about it?
In Software development topics I've changed my mind on
munificent·Feb 20, 2024
> Oh I'm curious why you're rewriting it? The primary driver is that we're moving to a fairly different formatting style: https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/issues/1253 The formatter works sort of like a compiler in that it parses the code, translates it to an internal representation, does optimization on that IR, and then outputs final code. The main difference is that the "final code" is also source code, and the "optimization" is line splitting. The old IR grew organically over time and got increasingly difficult to work with. It baked certain formatting choices directly into the IR (mainly indentation) which line splitting then had no control over. For example, given a function call like: someLongFunctionName(some + long + argument + expression, [firstElement, anotherElement, aThirdElement]); We might want to format it like
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this if the function name and first argument fits on one line: someLongFunctionName(some + long + argument + expression, [ firstElement, anotherElement, aThirdElement ]); But if the first argument doesn't fit, then we probably want: someLongFunctionName( some + long + argument + expression, [ firstElement, anotherElement, aThirdElement ]); Note how the indentation of the list elements depends on how we choose to line split the argument list. The old formatter's IR just couldn't model that at all. For years, I've wanted a better IR that could express formatting like this. And since we were making sweeping changes to the formatting style (including some that would be very hard to implement with the old IR), it seemed like the right time to move to a new internal representation too. > What do you think of the functional "pretty printing languages" like Wadler's (cited in the blog post)? I have to confess that I worked on dartfmt for a few years before I stumbled onto that paper. I'm somewhat familiar with it, but I've never taken the time to really dig into it. I could be wrong, but I strongly suspect that the formatting rules we want for Dart are too complex to model using Wadler's formalism directly, and I'm not sure if extending it to support the formatting rules we want would sacrifice its simplicity or performance. Given that, I sort of stuck with the devil I already knew—dartfmt's current architecture—and built off of that. > it does seem like there is a lot of labor in encoding the "rules people like", and flags for different styles. And then there's the actual algorithm to find the line breaks. Yes, and the two are deeply intertwined. The majority of dartfmt's code by line count is just implementing the style rules for every part of the language grammar. The most difficult code to write and maintain in dartfmt is the line splitting algorithm, largely because it's combinatorial when done naïvely.
In Why is Prettier rock solid?
munificent·Aug 7, 2018
Deprecating it is a breaking change and would make migrating code more difficult. It's like how semicolons are allowed but rarely used in Ruby, Go, etc. The style guide says to omit "new" [1], and our formatter can remove them for you [2], so the effect is that they are gone without the pain of a forced migration. [1]: https://www.dartlang.org/guides/language/effective-dart/usag... [2]: https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style
In Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform
munificent·Sep 12, 2015
Sounds like a lot of projects you worked on had tests at the wrong granularity. Fine grained unit tests are good for helping you find out where a bug is in the code, at the expense of calcifying your architecture. "Functional", "integration", "end-to-end" or other higher level tests don't pinpoint a bug as easily but in return they give you greater freedom to reorganize your implementation. For example, I work on a code formatter: https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style It has a metric ton of tests, which is absolutely critical for ensuring a change to one corner of the formatting doesn't regress other things. Formatting is solving a bunch of global constraints, so almost every change interacts with other things. I've rewritten almost the whole thing twice at this point, and the tests never slowed me down. That's because they're functiona
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l tests: they just run the formatter and validate the expected output. It does mean I spent a hell of a lot more time figuring out why some test was failing, but it made refactoring a joy.
In “People who implement new and improved interfaces always seem to get that wrong”

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