Ah I see, so Google doesn't use the open source version at all. I thought it was like Flutter or Angular where the OSS version was used but it's different in this case.
Just had another question, I actually just filed a feature request for Dart (based on reading this thread about Option and Result types) about whether Dart has a Result type [0]. Looks like it does in Flutter's async module, but I wasn't sure why that wasn't also brought to the rest of the language.
And for WASM, I thought garbage collection for WASM wasn't stabilized yet, will Dart have to wait until then? What benefits does WASM provide for Flutter that's not already covered by how it does web support anyway, ie drawing inside a canvas?
[0] https://github.com/dart-lang/language/issues/2697
In The road to Dart 3: A fully sound, null safe languagedart-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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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:04:58 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 year64 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-11-15 23:12:25 UTC to 2025-07-19 11:20:43 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| 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
13 sourcesPattern Matching looks good too !
https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/master/accepted/f...
In The road to Dart 3: A fully sound, null safe languageOff the top of my head, no access modifiers (so private variables, for example, are prefixed with `_`, by convention, not enforced by the compiler), no pattern matching (and obviously no exhaustive matching), no record types, no sum types, no json (de)serialization (requires 3rd party libary code gen, wow), mutability everywhere, everything is a statement (i.e. no implicit `return`, AKA everything is an expression), required semi-colons (which they'd like to get rid of but can't due to questionable design decisions made long ago -- for the gory details see here[1]).
If you like Java 8 and earlier you'll probably feel at home with Dart.
Obviously I'm biased, but I find Dart to be one of the most unpleasant languages I've had the misfortune of being exposed to; this despite Flutter and its instantaneous hot code reloading being quite amazin
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g -- a bizarre mix of promise and despair.
[1] https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/master/resources/...
Good news. It’s about to land. One nice thing about Dart is that they are extremely transparent in how they design the language. You can check out the entire repo here for an example of what I mean but if we are talking about these specific features this is a good place to start
Here is the intro:
https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/master/accepted/f...
Here is the spec of what they are currently implementing:
https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/master/accepted/f...
I think they both serve as a really good example of the kind of thoughtful approaches the language team are known for which coming from some different language communities previously I wasn’t accustomed to.
In Why doesn't flutter.dev use flutter as their front end?> Also thanks for adding sum types, and pattern matching, is there anyway you could get the dart team on board?
I'm driving the design of pattern matching for Dart. The entire language team is on board with them and we have a design that's pretty far along. It's really hard to integrate pattern matching into a language that wasn't originally designed for it, so it's taken a while to settle on a syntax that makes sense, but I think we're getting close.
If you'd like to be involved, there is a category on the issue tracker for design discussions related to patterns and records:
https://github.com/dart-lang/language/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is...
In Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++Au contraire! We're actively investigating them here on the Dart team. We're finalizing the spec here:
https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/98335746fb7f2dedf...
In Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++And it's getting patterns too: https://github.com/dart-lang/language/tree/master/working/05...
In Java record pattern matching in JDK 19Thought this link might actually be more helpful by the way if you're interested but Dart team does all of their language design in the open on Github which is pretty cool and also gives you a lot of context about how things end up the way they do.
I also mentioned elsewhere in the thread how impressed I was just watching that repo in general for a year. They clearly give a shit on a such a deep level about building a solid long term language in a way that I was totally unfamiliar with say coming from a Ruby background previously.
Here is the section on pattern matching specifically https://github.com/dart-lang/language/tree/master/working/05... and this is the design spec itself https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/master/working/05...
In Flutter 3> While that's great, I was hoping it would be like in Rust, where each enum variant can declare its own state components, but unfortunately it seems to be more like Java: same state for all variants.
Yes, the enhanced enums we shipped in 2.17 are like Java enums.
We are also working on support for pattern matching and algebraic datatype-style programming: https://github.com/dart-lang/language/blob/master/working/05...
I say "style" here because object-oriented languages like Dart can already mostly model sum types using subclasses. What you need to get the rest of the way there is basically just:
1. Sealed types so that the compiler can check for exhaustiveness when you match over all of the subclasses.
2. A nice pattern matching syntax to let you discriminate between the subclasses and destructure them.
3. Ideally, a nice lightweight sy
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ntax for defining a sum type family as a superclass and set of subclasses, though this is relatively less critical.
We're hard at work on this, but pattern matching in general is a pretty large feature and retrofitting it into a language whose syntax wasn't initially designed around it is a challenge.
I'm very excited about macros too. That's another large, difficult feature, but one that I hope will provide a lot of power to users and make the entire ecosystem more valuable over time.
Flutter 3 comes with an upgrade to Dart 2.17 [1], which has quite a few improvements as well... including state on enums.
While that's great, I was hoping it would be like in Rust, where each enum variant can declare its own state components, but unfortunately it seems to be more like Java: same state for all variants.
Well, at least there's quite a few other small but useful improvements... and they showed how they really listen to the community by implementing the new syntax for passing on constructor parameters to a super-class... and by improving the docs of the 200 most popular packages with lots of examples, as requested by the people.
I like how they're listening to the community as well to implement meta-programming (like macros) [2] to solve the main pain point, currently, in Dart, which is how verbose it is to generate code for
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things like serialization and data types.
Once they get that, Dart will be a really good language to work on (it's already quite ok IMO, despite most people, usually those who don't actually use it much, hating on it).
[1] https://medium.com/dartlang/dart-2-17-b216bfc80c5d
[2] https://github.com/dart-lang/language/issues/1482
> The Dart formatter sounds really advanced, and reflects potential complexity of the language.
You got that right -- check out this epic GitHub thread on optional semi-colons [1], and the author's own comment on the subject in an HN thread [2]
[1] https://github.com/dart-lang/language/issues/69
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706645
In The hardest program I've ever written (2015)Dart: Patterns Feature Specification (in progress proposal)
1 points · Open discussionI still can't believe Google wanted Dart to replace JavaScript, and still you can't express an object's interface in it.
https://github.com/dart-lang/language/issues/783
In All you should know about Flutter development