Tech preview of Chromium with Dart engine now available

FEB 16, 2012
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Pavel
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Vijay
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Anton

By Anton Muhin, Vijay Menon, and Pavel Podivilov, Software Engineers

Cross-posted with the Chromium Blog

An attractive feature of Web programming is a rapid development cycle. Reloading the application after the source code has changed takes a fraction of a second. We want to offer you that same experience when using Dart, and today we’re making Mac and Linux binaries available that integrate the Dart VM into Chromium.

This technology preview allows you to run your Dart programs directly on the Dart VM in Chromium and avoid a separate compilation step. Over time, these programs will take advantage of the VM’s faster performance and lower startup latency.

Dart has been designed from the start to work with the entire modern web, and we’re simultaneously continuing to improve our fast Dart-to-JavaScript compiler. Both the Dart VM and modern JavaScript engines are first-class targets for Dart.

This release of Chromium with Dart VM integration is a technology preview, and should not be used for day-to-day browsing. After more testing and developer feedback, we plan to eventually include the Dart VM in Chrome.

Today’s release of the Chromium + Dart VM integration is another step forward for the open source "batteries included" Dart platform. Our goal is to help you build complex, high performance apps for the modern web, and we encourage you to try Dart and let us know what you think.


Anton Muhin is an engineer at Google Saint Petersburg who recently worked on making V8 VM and DOM bindings faster and now is working on integrating the Dart VM into Chromium. Before that he worked on the Google Calendar backend.

Vijay Menon is a software engineer at Google Seattle working on integrating the Dart language and runtime into the browser. His background is in compilers, runtime systems, and parallel programming.

Pavel Podivilov is a software engineer at Google Saint Petersburg who worked on Chrome Developer Tools prior to joining the Dartium team.


Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor