Thanks for the input
sethladd, I forgot Dart compiles to Javascript! However:
Are the performance benefits negated by the "compiling to javascript" part?
This is a very important point actually - suppose we did rewrite our entire engine in Dart *and* figured out how to interop Dart with our Javascript SDK. If that meant lost performance on other browsers and/or significantly increased code size downloads, that's another reason not to adopt it.
I'm all in favour of a replacement language for Javascript, BTW. Dart is a great idea, but the practicality is it's unlikely to be worthwhile for a real engine like ours for the forseeable future.
If it had mature and widespread support on mobile that'd be more significant, since performance is more of a problem on mobile. But still, it's a huge amount of work for a slither of performance improvement, and V8 is definitely fast enough for a lot of what we do.