Hello World in Dart

Welcome to yet another community edition of the Hello World in Every Language series. This time, we have an article brought to you by Stargator. Let’s learn how to say Hello World in Dart!

Table of Contents

• Dart Background
• Hello World in Dart
• Sample Programs in Every Language

Dart Background

Dart is a general-purpose language that was designed with five goals:

• Productive
  • Dart’s syntax is clear and concise, its tooling simple yet powerful. Sound typing helps you to identify subtle errors early. Dart has battle-hardened core libraries and an ecosystem of thousands of packages
• Fast
  • Dart provides optimizing ahead-of-time compilation to get predictably high performance and fast startup across mobile devices and the web.
• Portable
  • Dart compiles to ARM and x86 code, so that Dart mobile apps can run natively on iOS, Android, and beyond. For web apps, Dart compiles to JavaScript.
• Approachable
  • Dart is familiar to many existing developers, thanks to its unsurprising object orientation and syntax. If you already know C++, C#, or Java, you can be productive with Dart in just a few days.
• Reactive
  • Dart is well-suited to reactive programming, with support for managing short-lived objects—such as UI widgets—through Dart’s fast object allocation and generational garbage collector. Dart supports asynchronous programming through language features and APIs that use Future and Stream objects.

Since its inception, Dart has gone through different phases as Google tried to sell its potential to developers. Google has rebuilt it’s advertising service AdSense with Dart. That demonstrate’s Google’s commitment to Dart by depending on the language for it’s main method of generating revenue.

The language also has many great features like garbage collection and a strong typing system (as of Dart 2.0). All of it sits on top of a VM like Java, which allows there to be less configuration between the test side and the source code. A programmer can just get started from the get-go!

Hello World in Dart

Coming from a Java background, the following snippet of code is downright stripped to the barebones.

void main() => print('Hello, World!');

In order to implement Hello World in Dart, developers need to understand only three concepts like main methods, strings, and arrow functions. But look at the code above, it seems deceptively easy, right?

What is going on is “main()” only does one thing, print the phrase “Hello, World!”. We’ll dig into how and why all of this happens in a bit. But it’s important to step away for a bit and just look at what’s there and acknowledge how simple it is.

In a Dart project, only one class would have a main method (“main()”). A main method is how every Dart program knows where to start. Therefore, every program must have exactly one of these main methods implemented. Don’t worry too much about the syntax. Just know that we need a main method.

Then we have to output our greeting (“Hello, World!”) to the command line. To do so, we have to leverage a static method out of Dart’s built-in library. It’s the “print” statement. It’s a method like “main()” only difference is we put a string inside the parentheses. It tells the computer to take the string and print out so we can read it.

The last concept are arrow functions (“=>”). These are methods like print or, in this case, main that only do one thing. Because they only do one thing, we can use “=>” from the method’s definition (“main()”) directly to the logic. Other more complex methods may require the use of “return”. But that’s not required in this case.

Sample Programs in Every Language

And, that’s it. Hello, World in Dart! If you need more information, take a tour of the Dart language.

As always, you can share your thoughts below in the comments. If you liked what you saw today, consider sharing it with your friends. And if you’re really feeling adventurous, why not contribute to the project?