Dart

Dart is a client-optimized language for developing fast apps on any platform. Its goal is to offer the most productive programming language for multi-platform development, paired with a flexible execution runtime platform for app frameworks.

Languages are defined by their technical envelope—the choices made during development that shape the capabilities and strengths of a language. Dart is designed for a technical envelope that is particularly suited to client development, prioritizing both development (sub-second stateful hot reload) and high-quality production experiences across a wide variety of compilation targets (web, mobile, and desktop).

Dart also forms the foundation of Flutter. Dart provides the language and runtimes that power Flutter apps, but Dart also supports many core developer tasks like formatting, analyzing, and testing code.

The Dart language is type safe; it uses static type checking to ensure that a variable’s value always matches the variable’s static type. Sometimes, this is referred to as sound typing. Although types are mandatory, type annotations are optional because of type inference. The Dart typing system is also flexible, allowing the use of a dynamic type combined with runtime checks, which can be useful during experimentation or for code that needs to be especially dynamic.

Dart has built-in sound null safety. This means values can’t be null unless you say they can be. With sound null safety, Dart can protect you from null exceptions at runtime through static code analysis. Unlike many other null-safe languages, when Dart determines that a variable is non-nullable, that variable can never be null. If you inspect your running code in the debugger, you see that non-nullability is retained at runtime; hence sound null safety.