Today we’re announcing a new release of the Dart SDK, version 2.8. We’re continuing to see amazing growth in the Dart community; we now have millions of Flutter developers using Dart as their client-optimized language for building fast apps on any platform.

The Dart platform comes with built-in support for package management via the pub client tool and the pub.dev package repository, which has grown 200% over the past year and now is home to nearly 10,000 packages. As part of our ongoing work to improve the Dart ecosystem, the Dart 2.8 SDK brings two improvements to the pub client tool: much better performance in pub get, and a new tool for ensuring your package dependencies are kept up-to-date.

Dart 2.8 also brings a set of small breaking changes in the Dart language and libraries. These changes lay the groundwork for our first version of the null safety feature.

Announcing Dart 2.8: Faster package tools, new tool for ensuring dependencies never go stale

Breaking changes paving the way for null safety

A common source of app crashes is code that attempts to use a variable that happens to be null.In some cases null values are useful; the challenge is separating those from the cases where they aren’t. For the past year we’ve been busy building support for sound null safety in Dart. This support will extend the type system to express variables that are always non-nullable, but in addition the type system will be fully sound: the Dart compilers and runtimes will be able to trust those types, and be able to produce optimized code when the type system guarantees that a variable isn’t null.

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