"Much more interesting than the benchmark was the ease with which the author seem to have translated dart to java"

Dart was initially slated for being "boring". It's comments like this that start to show that being familiar and unsurprising is sometimes a worthwhile goal.

In an addition to the parent comment, Dart uses its type system to increase performance, even when generating JavaScript: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbLkYlbEZ1E

Have you looked at Dart? It's not that far from Java.

Not really. It's a dynamically typed language that tries to fool the casual user into thinking it's statically typed.

But it has more normal types. I'm betting if asm.js takes off, dart2js could easily output code that uses it. Sure you can write fully untyped Dart code, but their js compiler already does a lot of type inference.

From this link on the dartlang site: http://www.dartlang.org/docs/dart-up-and-running/ch01.html#c...

"As VM engineers, the designers of Dart know how to build a language for performance. A more structured language is easier to optimize, and a fresh VM enables improvements such as faster startup."