
A stronger Dart for everyone - tweakz
http://news.dartlang.org/2017/06/a-stronger-dart-for-everyone.html
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munificent
I'm on the Dart team.

The headline isn't very explicit, but I think this is pretty exciting. What
this means is that we are taking the previous unsound optional type system and
replacing it with a sound static type system.

Even though strong mode is sound and mandatory, the language still has much of
the flexible feel it had before. The folks who designed the type system did a
fantastic job on the inference engine. Having a few million lines of existing
optionally-typed code that needed to gracefully migrate into strong mode
certainly helped too.

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rbehrends
Honestly, this baffles me. If I just wanted a language with a static type
system, I could already have my pick of the litter, and Dart as a language
doesn't really have any unique selling points outside of gradual typing.

On top of that is the problem that Dart's type system – at least as it stands
right now – is pretty weak (another point against it vs. other statically
languages). I feel like I'd be getting a watered-down Java/C#. That was okay
so far, because gradual typing allowed you to work around the problems in the
type system. But with _mandatory_ strong mode, that makes answering "why
Dart?" much harder now.

