Backends in Dart

Interview:

What is the focus of your work these days?

I'm working on the stability, scalability and reliability of our platform for personal data stores that we call atSigns.

And what's the motivation behind your talk?

I'm going to be talking about Dart on the back end, which we use. We build the personal data stores using Dart. At the moment, each of those runs as an ahead of time (AOT) compiled binary. But AOT compilation, although it gives us a lightweight, fast starting binary, robs us of the ability to observe what's going on inside of those personal data stores in terms of memory management. We don't actually see what's happening with the data because that's all encrypted. So I'm going to be talking a lot about snapshots, which is a cool feature of Dart, where it's kind of the best of both worlds. So you get to have Just in Time (JIT) compiler optimizations from the VM, but the snapshot means that you get a warm start rather than a cold start. It gets over that cold start problem that we're all familiar with from running things on Java, and so I think it's a really cool feature of Dart, one that's sort of underappreciated. I hope to raise awareness of Dart as a programming language and especially some of the things that can be done with it on the back end.

How would you describe the persona and level of the target audience for your session?

I think it's pretty wide. There'll be folks out there working with Dart already, maybe doing stuff in Flutter who want to see what they can do with Dart on the back end. There'll also be people using Java at the moment who might be interested in a similar but different virtual machine language; and then I think there will be startups doing observability, monitoring, security and things like feature flags where they've got an interest in Dart as a language especially now that it’s hit the top 20 in the popularity, and want to learn more about what's going on with it, how people are using it, and what the opportunities are for their platforms to support it.

Is there anything in particular that you would like the folks that go to see your session to walk away with after seeing your presentation?

I'd like them to try it out if they've not tried Dart before, and if they're a little more into Dart, I'd like them to try out things like snapshot for some backend services and see if that gives them the best of both worlds of quick starting applications that have a full observability tool suite associated with them.