I got bitten by this unsoundness which looks like to be present in Dart 2 as well
https://github.com/dart-lang/language/issues/753
In Why asynchronous Rust doesn't workdart-lang
language
TeX2018–2025
dart-lang / language
language
Design of the Dart language
32Distinct people
64Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.9KGitHub stars
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What it is
Design of the Dart language
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Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year64 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-11-15 23:12:25 UTC to 2025-07-19 11:20:43 UTC.
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| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 0 | 9 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 1 | 12 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 1 | 9 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 4 | 10 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Dart language evolution
This repository is the home for the design and evolution of the Dart
programming language. While the nature of language evolution is somewhat
unstructured, we follow a defined process to design and ship language
changes.
The language funnel shows the features that are being actively worked on.
Dart language team
As of February 2026, the Dart language team consists of:
Leaf Petersen (@leafpetersen)
Lasse R.H. Nielsen (@lrhn)
Bob Nystrom (@munificent)
Erik Ernst (@eernstg)
Nate Bosch (@natebosch)
Jake MacDonald (@jakemac53)
Paul Berry (@stereotype441)
Kallen Tu (@kallentu)
David Morgan (@davidmorgan)
Michael Thomsen (@mit-mit) is the product manager
for Dart. Erik Ernst also maintains the official language specification.
Contributing
We discuss language problems and potential features using the issue tracker
on this repo. We welcome your participation! Please keep in mind:
If you want to show support for a proposed change, a 👍 reaction is more
helpful than a comment because it's easier for us to aggregate demand that
way. Comments that provide additional context are still useful, though.
Before filing a new issue describing a problem or language change, see if
there is already an existing issue that's close to yours. Duplicate or
near-duplicates tend to divide attention and make both of them less visible.
When discussing a language change, motivating examples from real world code
are very helpful for the team and others following along to see how the
change would be helpful in a concrete context.
While other languages often have excellent beloved features, those features
don't always translate well to Dart (and vice versa). When proposing that
we borrow some feature from another language, try to articulate why you
think that feature would be right for Dart in particular. We want Dart to be
the best Dart, not the second-best Rust/Haskell/TypeScript/etc.
License and patents
See LICENSE and PATENTS.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
4 sourcesMostly because it has first-class functions and that's about it. Future might be used as a monad, but I'm not sure. Currently it has no ADTs, no pattern matching, Java-like immutability, null safety seems to be a special compiler feature rather than an option type or monad.
Right now it's less functional than Java, about as much as JavaScript (though in JS classes are less idiomatic so maybe it's a bit more functional in practice).
Considering what people are asking to add to the language (https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/master/working/05...), I wish people would start with a minimal functional language (Caml/SML without the modules, so functions, pattern matching and ADTs mostly) and then add things from there. It's a strong basis for a language, and people are going to ask for that stuff later anyways.
In Write in JavaScript, Render in FlutterSound null safety is one that most languages don't have.
Also looks like they're going to include static meta-programming, so you can metaprogram at compile time rather than runtime like many languages [0]. With this, many language features can be implemented yourself rather than needing the language maintainers to do so, such as adding dataclasses or (React-like) hooks. And if the state of the art changes, the language won't need to be redesigned or more stuff bolted on, you can just swap out the old language feature (as a package) and swap in the new one.
[0] https://github.com/dart-lang/language/issues/1482
In Write in JavaScript, Render in Flutter> Have you considered not going full-on structural-typing but still providing some sort of union?
I work on Dart. The terminology gets really confusing here. "Discriminated unions" and "union types" are two quite different things, though they get a little blurry in TS.
The short answer is, yes, we're investigating pattern matching with exhaustiveness checking and making the language more graceful at expressing algebraic datatype-style code. The last half of that sentence sounds weasely because any object-oriented language can (except for exhaustiveness checking) model an algebraic datatype using subtyping. The parent comment using an abstract base class is how you do it.
So there isn't anything really fundamental that Dart can't express already. It's mostly a question of giving users syntactic sugar to make code in that style look more te
Read the rest
rse and familiar. I personally really like pattern matching and ADTs and I also particularly like multi-paradigm languages, so this is a subject close to my heart.
The language team has been pretty busy with null safety, but now that that's out the door (woo!), we can start working on the next batch of features, which with luck includes pattern matching. Here's an in-progress proposal:
https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/master/working/05...