Dartium

» see dartlang.org/dartium as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Dart launched in 2011 with a plan that had two halves. One half was a compiler, dart2js, that turned Dart into JavaScript so the language could run anywhere. The other half was more ambitious: put the Dart virtual machine inside Chrome itself, so the language would eventually run natively in the browser with no translation layer and no JavaScript tax. Dartium was that second half, built and shipped so people could see what it would feel like.

It was a real Chromium with the VM wired in. Google announced the tech preview on 16 February 2012 for Linux and macOS, with a Windows build following on 2 April, and what it bought you was the edit-and-refresh cycle. You saved the file and hit reload, and the browser ran the source. Every other Dart developer on earth was waiting on a compile step between those two actions.

Then came the sentence that settled the language's future. On 25 March 2015 the Dart team announced that it would focus its web efforts on compiling to JavaScript: "We have decided not to integrate the Dart VM into Chrome." The strategy Dartium existed to preview was cancelled in one line, and the build itself carried on anyway, because developers still wanted the fast refresh even if the shipping story was now dart2js for everybody.

I have never written a line of Dart. My own work compiles down to boards and cameras rather than up into a page, and in 2012 a language whose entire pitch was the browser had no route to that end of the stack. Dart did find its users in the end, just not here and not on the web: Flutter made it a mobile language four years after the VM-in-Chrome plan died.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the timer inside it ~

Dartium is the only browser in this archive that was built to stop working. Each release carried a hard expiry date, and once it passed, the application refused to launch and showed a message saying the version had expired. Kevin Moore of the Dart team explained the reasoning later: the mechanism was mandated by the Chrome team, so that nobody would be left running an unpatched browser engine with known holes in it under a Google name.

It was a sensible rule that produced an absurd result. A GitHub issue opened on 22 June 2018 is titled "Dartium has expired," and the workaround people shared was to set the machine clock backward far enough that the check passed. The browser worked fine. It just would not admit it.

~ the version it was stuck on ~

Keeping a Chromium fork current is a full-time engineering job, and the Dart team was not staffed for it. The SDK changelogs make the lag visible: one release moved Dartium from Chrome 39 to Chrome 45 while noting that the Dart browser libraries were still generated against Chrome 39, and Dart 1.24, on 12 June 2017, moved it up to Chrome 50. Chrome itself was past version 59 by then. Developers were testing in a browser roughly two years behind the one their users had.

The replacement was dartdevc, a compiler fast enough to rebuild incrementally on every save, which removed the only remaining reason to maintain the fork. Moore's summary of the position was blunt: maintaining Dartium had become impossible given how Chrome had evolved, and the team no longer had the ability to build it.

~ one line in a changelog ~

Dart 2.0.0 was released on 7 August 2018, a reboot of the language with a sound type system and a long list of breaking changes. Near the bottom of that list, with no post and no farewell page, sits the obituary in full: "Dartium is no longer maintained or supported." The last build with it inside was the 1.24 line, whose final patch shipped on 14 December 2017.

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