When comparing ClojureScript vs Dart, the Slant community recommends Dart for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Dart is ranked 25th while ClojureScript is ranked 41st. The most important reason people chose Dart is:
Dart is a single threaded programming language. So if any piece of code blocks the execution of the program, the program practically freezes. To avoid this Dart makes use of asynchronous operations which let your program run without getting blocked. This is done through Future objects. A Future is an object which represent a means for getting a value at a certain point in the future. A function may invoke a Future and when that happens, two outcomes can be achieved: 1. The function is unable to return a value, so it queues up work to be done and returns an uncompleted Future object. 2. Or later when a value is available to be returned, the Future object completes with that value.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Live interactive programming with figwheel
Figwheel builds your ClojureScript code and hot loads it into the browser as you are coding! Every time you save your ClojureScript source file, the changes are sent to the browser so that you can see the effects of modifying your code in real time.
Pro Simple syntax
Lispness makes ClojureScript trivial to comprehend after an initial learning overhead.
Pro Easy to use existing JavaScript libraries
Clojure and ClojureScript are designed to be able to interact with their host. So the language by design makes it is easy to use existing JS libraries.
Pro Targets Google Closure-ready JavaScript for immense optimizations
Google's Closure Library converts regular JavaScript into a highly optimized form - including dead code analysis/elimination. It can even remove pieces of unused code from 3rd party libraries (eg, if you import jQuery but only use one function, Google Closure includes only that piece).
Pro Share application logic between browser and Clojure server
Clojure is also able to run web servers, so one can reap similar benefits to NodeJS in terms of sharing code between client and server.
Pro Can be used with React out of the box
Pro Excellent build tools
Both Leiningen and Boot are great build tools that manage code dependencies and deployment.
Pro Excellent tools for web development
ClojureScript has superb wrappers around React.js (see Reagent) that make building single-page apps a breeze. With figwheel, it's a web dev experience unlike any other -- hotloaded code, repl interaction, and instantly reflected changes make good development fun and fast. You can add things like Garden to make CSS-writing part of the same holistic experience and suddenly all development is a pleasant, smooth process.
Pro The Spec core library
From the creator of Clojure:
Spec is a new core library (Clojure 1.9 and Clojurescript) to support data and function specifications in Clojure.
Writing a spec should enable automatic: Validation, Error reporting, Destructuring, Instrumentation, Test-data generation and Generative test generation.
Pro Great async language support
Dart is a single threaded programming language. So if any piece of code blocks the execution of the program, the program practically freezes. To avoid this Dart makes use of asynchronous operations which let your program run without getting blocked. This is done through Future objects.
A Future is an object which represent a means for getting a value at a certain point in the future. A function may invoke a Future and when that happens, two outcomes can be achieved:
- The function is unable to return a value, so it queues up work to be done and returns an uncompleted Future object.
- Or later when a value is available to be returned, the Future object completes with that value.
Pro Great standard library
Dart includes a truly comprehensive core library, making it unnecessary to include disparate, external resources for basic functionalities Other than reducing the need to pull in various 3rd-party utilities this also ensures that all Dart code looks and feels the same.
Out of the box, the developer gets core libraries to help with: async, collections, strings, regexps, conversions, formats, file I/O, math, typed data, and more.
Pro No compile time in development
Dartium (Chromium derivative) is a browser with integrated Dart VM, which allows you to run and debug native Dart code during development for short edit-reload cycles. Only for testing on other browsers and deployment is transpiling to JS necessary.
Pro A lot of tools are available to help in developing with Dart
Dart has a lot of tools available which help with developing Dart applications. Some examples of those tools include:
- pub - package and dependency management and build tool
- analyzer - static syntax analysis with linter, quick fixes, autocompletion support for easy IDE integration
- test - powerful and flexible testing framework and test runner
- dev_compiler - generate reusable JS instead of tree-shaken minified JS output (work in progress)
- dartfmt_ - source code formatter
- server-side VM
- observatory - a powerful tool for profiling and debugging running Dart code (for Dartium and Dart server code)
Pro Transpiled JavaScript code works on all browsers
In Dart many browser differences (subtle differences and also missing features) are abstracted away or polyfilled. When Dart is transpiled to JS the output works on all supported browsers. There is usually no need to load polyfills or to consider browser differences during development. No need for libraries like jQuery to make the same code work the same on all browsers.
Pro Will be familiar to Java developers
The language will look familiar to Java developers, easing the learning curve.
And yet, while it's similar, it has some nice syntax facilities to avoid common boilerplate code found in Java. Code is terser, yet readable.
Pro Easy prototyping
Dart has an optional type system which makes Dart a great language for prototyping. It encourages developers to gradually evolve their programs without worrying about types first.
Pro Can compile to efficient machine code
Dart was designed to be as expressive as possible. Ahead-of-time compilers can compile Dart code to efficient machine code. This is especially important when deploying to mobile where you don't want (or can't) use a JIT.
Pro AngularDart 2.0 support
Pro Optional strong mode.
Strong mode applies a more restrictive type system to Dart to address its unsound, surprising behavior in certain cases.
Pro Support of semi-coroutines (generators)
Generators, also known as semicoroutines, are also a generalization of subroutines.
Generators are primarily used to simplify the control of iteration behavior of a loop, the yield
statement in a generator passes a value back to a parent routine.
A generator is very similar to a function that returns an array, in that a generator has a certain number of values. But instead of building and returning an array that contains all the wanted values, a generator returns them one at a time, this saves memory and allows the caller function to start processing the first few values immediately.
Pro The Dart to JavaScript compiler generates high quality source code
Dart to Javascript compiler (dart2js) generates very high quality source code with very high optimization. The output code is also very readable and easy to understand.
Pro Crossplatform
Dart does not just compile to JavaScript, it also compiles to native code on mobile platforms like iOS and Android as demonstrated by flutter.io
Cons
Con Tooling is horrible
I've never seen worse tooling before. Writing tests and getting test coverage reports is near impossible. Tooling is brittle and clunky. Feels prehistoric.
Con Syntax may seem cryptic to people not used to Lisp
Lisp is sometimes called "syntax-less" and this is bewildering to those steeped in Algol-type syntax (Java, Javascript, C, etc). Being a dialect of Lisp, ClojureScript's syntax may seem cryptic and hard to understand for people not used to it. While Lisp has very little syntax compared to other languages and it's generally considered pretty terse, there's still an initial overhead in learning the language.
Con Doesn’t generate consumable JavaScript at present
Dart builds to JavaScript but the entire app needs to be built to JavaScript at once for now (that may change in the future).
Con Still many holes to fill while converting code to Javascript
While implementing callbacks, passing a type to any function that gets passed to Javascript causes the dart2js compiler to crash.
Con Dart SDK does not provide standard (out of the box) way to access SQL-based databases on server side
This missing (but very popular) feature requires to use 3rd-party packages developed by the personal enthusiasts or very small groups of enthusiasts, which is not very convenient because they are all very fragmented in terms of content, the essence and capabilities.
Con Small community, little momentum
Con May be difficult to use some JavaScript libraries
Dart is much more than a programming language, it's a platform with its own standard libraries and tools. It's a major departure from JavaScript itself (even though it can compile to JS) that it's not possible to directly interact with JavaScript libraries in Dart. Instead, you have to use a special interop library which exposes the wrapped versions of the JavaScript objects that you are accessing.
While this enables Dart to sandbox JavaScript so that its problems do not leak into a Dart application, it also means that it may be cumbersome to use libraries which don't have a wrapper library available.