Google’s Dart Language Is Now An Official ECMA Standard

Google's Dart language officially declared as an ECMA standard now, and goes by the name ECMA-408. ECMA may not be a household name, but the ECMAscript is used to render some parts of a web page. It is actually the official standard body behind JavaScript. The organization before was also the backend specs for JSON, C#, the Office Open XML format and various CD-ROM specs.

Since the Dart team, led by Lars Bak, said that the language was stable enough for a 1.0 release during the previous year. His team has been working on the standardization process with ECMA, and has finally approved the Dart language specs a few days ago, which are based on Dart 1.3, as the team shared on Google+ today.

This may seem like a small progress for a relatively fresh language, but standardizing Dart could help the team start a more active environment around the language. Now, that the language specs are stabilized, it becomes easier for other developers to implement Dart, which isn't as much of a moving target.

While the Dart team considers the language for general purpose, its strengths are designed obviously in creating web apps. However, even Google's own Chrome supports Dart by default. As an alternative, developers have to either use a special build of Chrome with Dart virtual machine, or they have to compile their code to JavaScript (although Google might start supporting Dart directly in future versions of Chrome soon). 

While ECMA has now gained 1.0 standard, the team is still moving forward. Bask said at the Google I/O last month, support for enums and deferred loading, as well as a few basic support for async are on the group's blueprint and may become part of the next revision of the Dart spec towards the end of the year.