Today Google introduced an early preview of Dart, a class-based optionally typed programming language for building web applications.

According to Lars Bak, Software Engineer @ Dart Team, Dart's design goals are:

- Create a structured yet flexible language for web programming.
- Make Dart feel familiar and natural to programmers and thus easy to learn.
- Ensure that Dart delivers high performance on all modern web browsers and environments ranging from small handheld devices to server-side execution.

Dart targets a wide range of development scenarios: from a one-person project without much structure to a large-scale project needing formal types in the code to state programmer intent. To support this wide range of projects, Dart has optional types; this means developers can start coding without types and add them later as needed.

Dart code can be executed in two different ways: either on a native virtual machine or on top of a JavaScript engine by using a compiler that translates Dart code to JavaScript. This means developers can write a web application in Dart and have it compiled and run on any modern browser. The Dart VM is not currently integrated in Chrome but Google plans to explore this option.

The language comes with a set of basic libraries and tools for checking, compiling, and running Dart code. Google has made the language and preliminary tools available as open source on dartlang.org.