Playing with Dart 3 on Windows

This repository gathers Dart 3 code examples coming from various websites - mostly from the Dart project - or written by ourself. In particular it includes several build scripts (Bash scripts, batch files, Make scripts) for experimenting with the Dart 3 language on a Windows machine.

Ada, Akka, C++, COBOL, Dafny, Deno, Docker, Erlang, Flix, Golang, GraalVM, Haskell, Kafka, Kotlin, LLVM, Modula-2, Node.js, Rust, Scala 3, Spark, Spring, TruffleSqueak, WiX Toolset and Zig are other topics we are continuously monitoring.

☛ Dart 3 contains three major advancements. Read the document "Announcing Dart 3" for more details. Furthermore the document "Dart language evolution" describes changes and additions to the Dart language.

Project dependencies

This project depends on the following external software for the Microsoft Windows platform:

• Dart 3.6 (changelog) (issue tracker)
• Git 2.47 (release notes)

Optionally one may also install the following software:

• ConEmu 2023 (release notes)
• Visual Studio Code 1.96 (release notes)

☛ Installation policy
When possible we install software from a Zip archive rather than via a Windows installer. In our case we defined C:\opt\ as the installation directory for optional software tools (in reference to the /opt/ directory on Unix).

For instance our development environment looks as follows (December 2024) ¹:

C:\opt\ConEmu\      ( 26 MB)
C:\opt\dart-sdk\    (542 MB)
C:\opt\Git\         (393 MB)
C:\opt\VSCode\      (381 MB)

🔎 Git for Windows provides a Bash emulation used to run git.exe from the command line (as well as over 250 Unix commands like awk, diff, file, grep, more, mv, rmdir, sed and wc).

Directory structure ▴

This project has the following directory structure :

bin\
dartbyexample\{README.md, exceptions, ..}
docs\
examples\{README.md, hello-dart, ..}
macros-examples\{README.md, bird, userJson, ..}
README.md
RESOURCES.md
setenv.bat

where

• directory bin\ contains several batch files.
• directory docs\ contains several Dart related papers/articles (docs\README.md).
• directory examples\ contains Dart examples grabbed from various websites (examples\README.md).
• directory macros-examples\ contains Dart examples using macros and grabbed from various websites (macros-examples\README.md).
• file README.md is the Markdown document for this page.
• file RESOURCES.md is the Markdown document presenting external resources.
• file setenv.bat is the batch command for setting up our environment.

We also define a virtual drive – e.g. drive T: – in our working environment in order to reduce/hide the real path of our project directory (see article "Windows command prompt limitation" from Microsoft Support).

🔎 We use the Windows external command subst to create virtual drives; for instance:

> subst T: %USERPROFILE%\workspace\dart-examples

In the next section we give a brief description of the batch files present in this project.

Batch/Bash commands

setenv.bat ²

We execute command setenv.bat once to setup our development environment; it makes external tools such as git.exe, make.exe and sh.exe directly available from the command prompt.

   > setenv
   Tool versions:
      dart 3.6.0, make 4.4.1, code 1.96.0,
      git 2.47.1, diff 3.10, bash 5.2.37(1)
    
   > where git make sh
   C:\opt\Git\bin\git.exe
   C:\opt\Git\mingw64\bin\git.exe
   C:\opt\msys64\usr\bin\make.exe
   C:\opt\Git\bin\sh.exe
   C:\opt\Git\usr\bin\sh.exe
   

Command setenv -verbose also displays the tool paths, the environment variables and the path associations (use subcommand helpto print the help messsage) :

> setenv -verbose
Select drive I: for which a substitution already exists
Tool versions:
   dart 3.6.0, make 4.4.1, code 1.96.0,
   git 2.47.1, diff 3.10, bash 5.2.37(1)
Tool paths:
   C:\opt\dart-sdk\bin\dart.exe
   C:\opt\msys64\usr\bin\make.exe
   C:\opt\Git\bin\git.exe
   C:\opt\Git\usr\bin\diff.exe
   C:\opt\Git\bin\bash.exe
Environment variables:
   "DART_HOME=C:\opt\dart-sdk"
   "GIT_HOME=C:\opt\Git"
   "MSYS_HOME=C:\opt\msys64"
   "VSCODE_HOME=C:\opt\VSCode"
Path associations:
   I:\: => %USERPROFILE%\workspace-perso\dart-examples

Footnotes ▴

[1] Downloads ↩

In our case we downloaded the following installation files (see section 1):

ConEmuPack.230724.7z              (  5 MB)
dartsdk-windows-x64-release.zip   (201 MB)
PortableGit-2.47.1-64-bit.7z.exe  ( 41 MB)
VSCode-win32-x64-1.96.0.zip       (131 MB)

[2] setenv.bat usage ↩

Batch file setenv.bat has specific environment variables set that enable us to use command-line developer tools more easily.

It is similar to the setup scripts described on the page "Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt and Developer PowerShell" of the Visual Studio online documentation.

For instance we can quickly check that the two scripts Launch-VsDevShell.ps1 and VsDevCmd.bat are indeed available in our Visual Studio 2019 installation :

> where /r "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio" *vsdev*
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\Tools\Launch-VsDevShell.ps1
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\Tools\VsDevCmd.bat
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\Tools\vsdevcmd\core\vsdevcmd_end.bat
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Community\Common7\Tools\vsdevcmd\core\vsdevcmd_start.bat

Concretely, in our GitHub projects which depend on Visual Studio (e.g. michelou/cpp-examples), setenv.bat does invoke VsDevCmd.bat (resp. vcvarall.bat for older Visual Studio versions) to setup the Visual Studio tools on the command prompt.

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mics/December 2024 ▲