Dart is the programming language Google unveiled in 2011 for building applications for its web platform.
Google announced Dart at the GOTO conference in Aarhus, Denmark, in October 2011. The language was designed by Lars Bak and Kasper Lund, who had extensive experience with virtual machines and JavaScript performance. Dart aimed to provide a structured, object-oriented language for web applications while still supporting compilation to JavaScript.
Dart later became closely associated with Flutter, Google’s UI toolkit for building applications across mobile, web, and desktop platforms. Dart supports both just-in-time compilation for development and ahead-of-time compilation for deployment, depending on the target and tooling.
Dart is sometimes confused with TypeScript because both can be used to build web applications and can produce JavaScript-related output. They are different languages with different designers and type systems. Dart’s broader modern identity comes from its use with Flutter, while its original announcement focused on improving the experience of developing large web applications.