justbuchanan / ui-as-code

Design work on improving Dart's syntax for UI code

This repo tracks design work to try to extend Dart syntax to better support Flutter's style of UI code and similar code in other frameworks.

Usual caveats apply: the work is early, experimental, and subject to change. It might not pan out at all.

Docs

• Motivation - A detailed breakdown of the current usability problems that we're trying to improve.

• Constraints - Softer guiding principles to help get as much value as we can from a solution.

• Research - Background information on other languages and frameworks and how they approach this. Prior art, inspiration, and pitfalls to avoid. JSX gets its own page.

• Choices - High level survey of different approaches to handling conditional execution.

Proposals

• Parameter Freedom - Loosen restrictions around positional, optional, and named parameters. Add rest parameters and a spread operator. Let API authors define flexible, expressive parameter lists that free callers from writing useless boilerplate.

• Spread Collections - Allow the same ... spread syntax from Parameter Freedom to be used in list and map literals to insert multiple elements.