Does google dart produce ES5 friendly javascript and does that include or exclude IE8 today?

Question

I'm doing some research to see if the current implementation of google dart is IE8 friendly. Our team has to support IE8 for some time and I'm trying to find out if the javascript produced from dart today works for this legacy browser.

Does the dart transcompiler lint the output javascript like coffeescript does?

And finally does dart produce ES5 friendly javascript?

Answer 1

Dart only targets ES5-capable browsers, that is Internet Explorer >= 9, Firefox >= 4, Opera >= 12 and reasonably new WebKit-based browsers. IE 8 is off the table.

Also, I think that currently, it's more likely to experience issues in browsers other than newest Chromium/Chrome, but I don't have a direct experience with this.

Answer 2

From the Dart FAQ - What browsers do you plan to support as JavaScript compilation targets?:

We're currently aiming to support the following browsers:
* Internet Explorer, latest two versions that are 9 or higher.
* Firefox, latest two versions that are 7 or higher.
* Chrome, latest version.
* Safari, latest two versions that are 5.1 or higher.
* Opera, latest version that is 12 or higher.

That's a goal; we don't actually support all of these browsers yet. The goal may change to be either more restrictive or more permissive.

So no, they do not currently intend on supporting IE8.