Dartino ... overnight success?

I joined Object Technology International (OTI) in the mid 90's, leveraging my Smalltalk and engineering background, to work in their embedded Smalltalk team.  Embedded Smalltalk in those days was a pretty tough sell, but some companies realized the advantages of superior language and tooling.  Many of the target boards had only a serial link to the development machine, so the traditional compile/download/printf cycle was a lengthy, productivity sapping exercise.  Envy/Developer offered a Smalltalk IDE and runtime environment, with the ability to do remote debugging and hot code replacement.  Once the runtime was loaded onto the target, smaller application code bundles could be downloaded and executed.  A remote debugger on the development machine meant you could set breakpoints and/or single step your code to find bugs, edit the offending code, drop the stack and resume execution all from inside the debugger.

Dave Thomas, OTI founder, in a wide ranging presentation You Can’t Do That With Smalltalk! - Can You? Lessons From The Past – Challenges For The Future gives an overview of the commercial impact of Smalltalk and references some of the embedded uses, particularly the Tektronix TDS 500 Series oscilloscope built with a 68020 processor, approx 250 classes and using less than 64kB RAM.

Fast forward through the introduction of Java, the drive with J2ME to address the mobile device market, then the Android asteroid which laid waste to many existing players. Web development meanwhile was moving to Javascript and Node.js, in response to the benefits of a dynamic language and simplified deployment.  There were issues with tooling and scale, and Google released the Dart language as one answer to these challenges.  To an outsider, Dart appears a very pragmatic and tempered approach to language design, with a careful balance between performance, familiarity and feature. Several of the core team were also instrumental in the development at Animorphic Systems in 1996 of Strongtalk, an advanced, high performance Smalltalk with optional typing.

The maker movement and success of Arduino raised the profile of embedded computing, but many of the old barriers to entry remained.  Some platforms offered simplified coding and numerous libraries, but poor debug.  Others were fine for simple demands, but failed to scale.  Then Fletch was announced last year and rebranded last month as Dartino.  With a catchy name, Dartino brings Dart to the world of microcontrollers. Nicely described in a talk by Kasper Lund "Internet of Programmable Things" at the GOTO Copenhagen 2015 conference, Dartino sets out to simplify embedded development and bring an advanced language onto constrained platforms.  Take a look at: characteristics of the runtime, consideration of the subsystems, the interface between the compiler and runtime, and the introduction of Fibers.  The 32bit STM32F7 microcontroller mentioned, with 320kB RAM and clocked at 216 MHz, is certainly an interesting starting point.

Dartino has the pedigree and potential to open embedded development to a wider and younger developer audience, to compliment the hardware opportunity offered by the Raspberry Pi and more.  An overnight success? 20 years in the making.