Acknowledgments

The Dart programming language is the result of a large team effort. My work on Dart has been made much more pleasant because it has involved many colleagues who have been a pleasure to work with, many of whom are not only co-workers but friends. It has been my privilege to document some of this effort in this book, as well as via the Dart Language Specification.

The Dart language was conceived and designed by Lars Bak and Kasper Lund, and so this book literally could not exist without them. Lars is a longtime friend and colleague who has led the Dart project from its beginning. Among other things, Lars got me involved with Dart, and for that I owe him special thanks. Both Lars and Kasper are not only phenomenally talented systems designers and implementors, but fun to be with as well!

Special thanks also to Erik Meijer; working with him on the asynchronous features of Dart was a joy. Erik is a real programming language professional, of a caliber one meets only rarely.

If Chapter 8 owes a lot to Erik, Chapter 7 owes much to Ryan Macnak, who implemented mirrors in the Dart VM, to Peter Ahé, who pioneered them in dart2js, and to Erik Ernst, who worked on the reflectable library.

My work on the book you hold in your hands was supported not only by Lars, but also by my manager Ivan Posva. For the past four years I have shared office space with Ivan and the other members of the VM team in Mountain View: Zachary Anderson, Daniel Andersson, Siva Annamalai, Régis Crelier, Matthias Hausner, Ryan Macnak, John McCutchan, Srdjan Mitrovic and Todd Turnidge. I thank them for the pleasant company.

My frequent visits to Dart supreme headquarters in Aarhus, Denmark, have always been fun (even if the actual travel was not). The administrative support of Linda Lykke Rasmussen has been priceless.

My work on the Dart specification is the direct basis for this book. That work has benefited from the careful critiques of many people, but none more than Lasse Nielsen whose phenomenal attention to detail has caught many subtle issues.

I’ve also been heavily involved in the process of standardizing Dart. Anders Sand-holm has shielded me from much of the burdens involved therein; I owe him for that. I also thank the other participants in the Dart standards committee, ECMA TC52.

Dart would not be possible without the work of many other Dart team members past and present. They are too numerous to list but they have all contributed to making Dart what it is today.

My longtime editor, Greg Doench, has always been exceedingly patient and a pleasure to work with.

As always, my wife, Weihong, and my son, Teva, make it all worthwhile.

Gilad Bracha
Los Altos, California
November 2015