What Is Dart?

Dart is a general-purpose programming language created by Google, first released in 2011. Today it's best known as the language of Flutter, Google's toolkit for building apps for Android, iOS, the web, and desktop from a single codebase.

void main() {
  final name = 'Dart';
  print('Hello, $name!');
}

Hello, Dart!

Its defining traits:

• Sound null safety — the compiler guarantees that a variable which can't be null never is, preventing a very common kind of crash.
• Statically typed, with type inference — every value has a type, but you rarely need to write it.
• Familiar syntax — if you've seen Java, C#, JavaScript, or Kotlin, Dart will look friendly: curly braces, classes, and semicolons.
• Flexible compilation — during development, Dart runs with a fast just-in-time compiler that powers Flutter's hot reload (see your changes in a running app in about a second). For release, it compiles ahead of time to fast native machine code, or to JavaScript and WebAssembly for the web.
• Built-in async support — async/await, futures, and streams are part of the language.

This course targets Dart 3, which added records, patterns, and sealed classes. The examples were run on Dart 3.13.