Introduction to Dart: History and Setting Up

The Origins of Dart

Key Features of Dart

• Object-Oriented: Everything in Dart is an object, offering powerful features like classes, interfaces, and mixins.

• Just-In-Time (JIT) and Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) Compilation: Dart provides exceptional performance through its ability to compile JIT for development (providing a fast reload experience) and AOT for production (ensuring optimized, high-performance applications).
Read more here.

• Rich Standard Library: Dart comes with a comprehensive set of pre-defined classes for various tasks including asynchronous programming, managing collections, and handling dates and times.

Setting Up the Dart Development Environment

1. Installing Dart
To begin working with Dart, you need to install the Dart SDK. Here are the general steps:
• Windows/Mac/Linux: Visit the official Dart SDK webpage at dart.dev and follow the instructions for your operating system.

2. Verifying the Installation
Once installed, open your terminal or command prompt and run:

dart --version

This command should return the version of Dart installed on your system, confirming that the installation was successful.

3. Choosing an IDE
While you can use any text editor for Dart, IDEs like Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, or Android Studio provide additional benefits like syntax highlighting, code completion, and debugging tools. Most of these IDEs require you to install a Dart (and possibly Flutter) plugin.

4. Creating Your First Dart Project
• In your IDE or terminal, create a new directory for your Dart project.
• Inside this directory, create a new file named main.dart.
• Write the classic Hello World program:

void main() {
  print('Hello, World!');
}

• Run your Dart program in the terminal using:

dart run main.dart

Conclusion