We went through the most important changes to the Dart language. Sound type system, spread operator, collection if and for, extension methods, null safety, and type aliases.
In this episode, I talked about the evolution of the Dart programming language.
The Dart language improves greatly from release to release. Since 2.0, Dart has a sound type system. Since then, many valuable features were added to the language, for example int-to-double conversion, set literals, as well as operators to improve code that performs list manipulation: the spread operator, collection if and for operators. Extension methods were a great addition to the language and they enable you to add any functionality to any type, even types you don't own, thus making your code very expressive.
Since Dart 2.12, the language supports sound null safety. When you opt into null safety, types in your code are non-nullable by default, meaning that variables can’t contain null unless you say they can. With null safety, your runtime null-dereference errors turn into edit-time analysis errors.
This podcast episode builds heavily on the official Dart documentation and version announcements.
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Host: Vince Varga