Comment by Daniel V on "Angular2 Dart - My experience so far"

Very good read and welcome to the Dart world! :)

One thing I cannot stress enough about Dart is it's super helpful guys on it's Slack channels.

I've been looking at Angular 2 Dart as well for the past couple months and the experience was very similar to yours - feeling like a Rock Star. An interesting thing I noticed was tiny size of the built JS files of my project. Generally speaking, dart2js can produce large files, especiall if mirroring is used but this does seem to be the case, the compiled application was smaller than the dependencies of the TS version. I was quickly won over!

I avoid using mirrors at all cost, as soon as I use mirrors, the generated JS explodes in size. The @MirrorsUsed seems to help with this though. Dart feels like a mixture between Java and JavaScript, so quick to pick up by most developers. Pub is also great, no need for Jrebel or SpringLoaded when using Dart; just refresh the browser and it's there immediately - just like JavaScript, no latency or waiting period before you can refresh the page.

The reflectable package provides much better support to define what needs to kept available for reflective access than @MirrorsUsed() from dart:mirrors to not hurt tree-shaking more than necessary. It generates code from reflective access and reflective access isn't used anymore after dart2js.

I hardly have the need for reflection in the frontend, if I do need it, it seems I'll need to go do a refresher in the docs :-)

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