Important Concepts of Dart
Dart is an object-oriented, class-based programming language with optional typing and support for mixin-base inheritance. When dealing with Dart, you should keep the following ideas in mind:
- Everything is an object, and every object is a class instance, and all the objects inherit from the Object class.
- Specifying static types clarifies your intent and allows tools to do static checks.
- Before running your code, Dart parses it.
Dart Features
Dart is an OOPs (Object Oriented Programming) language that is free and open source. The Dart comes with a slew of useful features centered on compilation, execution, memory management, safety, and concurrency. The following is a list of some of Dart's most important features:
- Object-Oriented Programming: Dart is an OOPS language that includes concepts like inheritance, interfaces, and optional typing features. Interfaces, abstract classes, reified generics, static typing, and a robust type system are also supported.
- Open Source: Dart is an open-source programming language that includes tools for building and running Dart code. It's an ECMA standard, and it's available under the BSD license.
- Cross-Platform: Dart runs on all major operating systems and is cross-platform. The Dart compiler has its own Virtual Machine, allowing Dart programs to run on various platforms.
- Browser Support: source-to-source compilation can be used to convert Dart code to JavaScript. Dart code is transpiled into the efficient JavaScript code that runs on all modern web browsers using the dar2js compiler.
- Type-Safe: Dart is a computer language that is type-safe. To verify that a variable's value always matches the variable's static type, Dart employs a combination of static type checking and runtime checks. Even though Dart is strongly typed, type annotations are not required due to type inference.
- Ahead-Of-Time (AOT): The AOT compilation mode is supported by Dart. The Dart code can be directly transformed into native machine code in this mode. Flutter apps are deployed as AOT Compiled Dart code to app stores.
- Reuse Of Code: Dart cade is a compiled optimized JavaScript code that works in all recent web browsers. This allows Dart code to be reused in both mobile and web applications. According to reports, Dart code can be reused up to 70% of the time between their mobile and web applications.
- Flexible Compilation and Execution: Dart has a lot of flexibility when it comes to compilation and execution. Dart code can be AOT or JIT built, interpreted, or transpiled into other languages easily. Dart compilation and execution are not just extremely versatile but also extremely quick.
- Asynchronous Programming: Asynchronous programming in Dart allows your program to operate without being blocked. Dart is a single-threaded programming language that allows developers to ensure that key tasks are completed without interruption.
- Concurrency: Dart is an asynchronous programming language that achieves concurrency using isolates. Isolates are the independent workers who do not share their memory; instead, they communicate by passing the messages over channels; isolates are a lot similar to web workers in JavaScript. Because isolates communicate by passing messages, a means to serialize a message is required. This can be accomplished by creating a snapshot from a particular object, which is then passed to another isolate for deserialization.
- Strong Tooling: Dart SDK includes a large number of execution contexts, libraries, and tools that are specific to the language. An editor is also included with the Dart project. Code completion, refactoring, rapid fixes, code navigation, debugging, and more are all available. IntelliJ also offers a Dart plugin.
- Libraries: The Dart SDK includes many built-in libraries, such as core, async, math, and convert. Dart allows you to group Dart code into libraries for easy reusability and namespacing. We can import a library later, and libraries can export and re-export.
- Familiar Syntax: Dart doesn't reinvent the wheel when it comes to language syntax. When you look at Dart code, you'll notice that it has a syntax that's very similar to Java and C#.
- Community: Dart is supported by a huge community of Dart programmers. It is therefore simple to seek assistance if you become stuck when designing an application.
Principles of Dart
When dealing with Dart, you should be aware of the following aspects or principles(features of dart programming language).
Keywords
Dart, like other languages, has a fairly standard set of keywords. But keep in mind that in Dart, we don't have public, protected, or private.
Variables
Variables can be defined simply as references.
var blog_writer = 'Code Studio';
A reference to a String object with the value "Code Studio" is stored in the variable blog_writer. Everything (even number) in Dart is an object, as I explained earlier. It signifies that uninitialized variables have null(no value).
Built-in Types
These are the Built-in types that are supported by Dart:
Number: integer type(int) and double
Strings: A Dart string is made up of UTF-16 code units in a specific order.
Booleans: Dart also has a built-in type named bool. The boolean literals true and false are the only objects of type bool.
Lists: Arrays are the list objects in Dart.
Maps: A map is a data structure(DS) that connects keys and values. Any type of object can be used as both a key and a value.
Runes: A string's UTF-32 code points are known as runes.
Symbols: An operator or identifier which is declared in a Dart program is represented as a Symbol object.
Mixins
Mixins allow you to reuse a class's code across different hierarchies. In other words, use Mixins if you want to use the code of other classes but don't want to inherit them (essentially, a class can only have one superclass).
Asynchronous functions
Asynchronous functions are supported by Dart's Future and Stream objects.
Futures: Future denotes that the return value will be returned at some point in the future. A function that returns a Future must also be tagged as async.
Stream: To get a succession of events, you'll need Stream support (both data and error). We can utilize async and asynchronous for loops(await for) to get values from a Stream.
Note: This is all for the Introduction and features part of Dart. So, once you've mastered Dart, you may check out these frameworks:
Flutter: For mobile(Android + IOS) application development
AngularDart: For web page
DVM: For a virtual machine or a server
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between Dart and Flutter?
Flutter is a Google-developed open-source user interface SDK. It supports the creation of iOS/Android apps and uses the Dart programming language. Dart is a client-side programming language that is open-source. It's simple to learn, reliable, and capable of producing high-performance applications.
What is the best use for Dart?
Dart, like JavaScript, is suitable for mobile and web development. For designing cross-platform mobile apps with the Flutter framework, Dart became popular. Dart can also be used to create web apps. However, it is only utilized for this purpose on a very limited basis.
Is Dart the way of the future?
No doubt, Dart has a great future ahead of it. The Dart team has spent the last year working to make it the best language available for client-side web programming using the AngularDart framework and cross-platform development with the Flutter framework. On both GitHub and Stack Overflow, it has outperformed react native.
Conclusion
In this article, we learned about Dart and its features.
However, learning never stops, and there is more to learn. So head over to our Android Development Course on the Coding Ninjas Website to dive deep into Android Development and build future applications.
We hope this article has helped you enhance your knowledge as a Dart beginner. If you want to learn more, check out our article on environment setup and Competitive Programming articles. Do upvote this article to help other ninjas grow.
Happy Coding!
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