1. Compiles to native code with a single and very reasonable sized binary on pretty much any platform.
2. Compile to WASM (coming this year) if that’s your thing.
3. Excellent concurrency support with lightweight and simple mental models
4. Variables are not nullable by default thus simplifying tedious checking in your codebase.
5. Syntactically it’s the best parts of Java and JavaScript combined without all the foot guns and verbosity.
6. Full support for both OOP and functional code styles
7. Existing interop support with C, C++, Rust, Java and JavaScript and in the future WASI.
8. Fully static / compile time metaprogramming capabilities coming this year.
9. Also have maybe one of the best teams working on it that I’ve ever seen in an open source project anywhere. They put in a stupid amount of detail and care to try and keep everything pointing in the right direction at a macro level and have really strong levels of transparency around how the language is developed https://github.com/dart-lang/language
Honestly I think it’s critically under-rated and under-used. Most of its common criticisms I see about it are many years out of date.
Just start creating packages for this language and very soon you'll have a rich ecosystem too.
This is not an inherent characteristic of a language itself, it's something powered by the community and built over time.
The larger community is => the better ecosystem we get.
Re: lacking features. Feel free to submit a request here https://github.com/dart-lang/language
Dart team is already working on some nice additions to the language. If ADTs are something many community members are looking for, I'm pretty sure it'll be added.
> and brings absolutely nothing useful
Dart is a language that's predictable (no WATs), performant, has the best built-in tooling to facilitate quick iterative development, the best package manager and can be used to build web, mobile and desktop apps with high level of shared codebase between them.
It's not the best language by any means but it's already a good language. And it's getting better and better.