dds

• Update to version 2.1 of the DDS protocol.
• Deprecate getAvailableCachedCpuSamples and getCachedCpuSamples RPCs.
• Deprecate the cachedUserTags parameter of DartDevelopmentService.startDartDevelopmentService.
• Deprecate the DartDevelopmentService.cachedUserTags getter.

• [DAP] Breakpoints are now added/removed individually instead of all being cleared and re-added during a setBreakpoints request. This improves performance and can avoid breakpoints flickering between unresolved/resolved when adding new breakpoints in the same file.

• [DAP] Handle some additional errors if the VM Service is shutting down during an attempt to resume an isolate.
• [DAP] Stack frames with dots in paths will now be parsed and have locations attached to OutputEventss.
• [DAP] Responses to evaluateRequest that are lists now include indexedVariables to allow for client-side paging.

• [DAP] Handle possible race condition when interacting with web applications that can cause an RPCError to be thrown if the application's isolate is disposed mid-RPC.

• Widen the dependency on package:shelf_web_socket.
• Require Dart SDK v. 3.5.0 or higher.
• Started caching events sent on the 'Timer' stream. The cached events can be retrieved using the getStreamHistory RPC.

• [DAP] The debug adapter no longer spawns its own in-process copy of DDS, instead relying on one started by the Dart VM (or Flutter). This means the enableDds and enableAuthCodes arguments to the DartDebugAdapter base class have been deprecated and have any effect. Suppressing DDS (or auth codes) should be done in launch configuration (for example using vmAdditionalArgs or toolArgs depending on the target tool).
• Updated the devtools_shared dependency to version ^11.0.0.
• Made runDartDevelopmentServiceFromCLI pass the specified bind address directly into startDartDevelopmentService without resolving the address.
• [DAP] Evaluations now use Service ID Zones to more precisely control the lifetime of instance references returned. This should avoid instances being collected while execution is paused, while releasing them once execution resumes.
• Updated vm_service constraint to >=14.3.0 <16.0.0.
• [DAP] Updated dap constraint to ^1.4.0.
• [DAP] Set supportsANSIStyling to true in debug adapter capabilities to indicate that Output events might contain ansi color codes.
• [DAP] Stack traces in more formats will be parsed and have locations attached to OutputEventss.
• Update to be forward compatible with package:shelf_web_socket version 3.x.

• Added a new constant RpcErrorCodes.kConnectionDisposed = -32010 for requests failing because the service connection was closed. This value is not currently used but is provided for clients to handle in preperation for a future release that will use it to avoid clients having to read error messages.
• Loosened type of google3WorkspaceRoot parameter to DartDevelopmentServiceLauncher.start from Uri? to Object?. This parameter will eventually be changed to String?, but will allow both Uri? and String? values for now.

• [DAP] Fixed an issue where "Service connection disposed" errors may go unhandled during termination/shutdown.
• Add google3WorkspaceRoot parameter to DartDevelopmentServiceLauncher.start.

• Fixed DevTools URI not including a trailing '/' before the query parameters, which could prevent DevTools from loading properly.
• [DAP] Fixed an issue where format specifiers and format.hex in variablesRequest would not apply to values from lists such as Uint8List from dart:typed_data.
• Added package:dds/dds_launcher.dart, a library which can be used to launch DDS instances using dart development-service.

• Fix issue where DartDevelopmentServiceException.fromJson would throw a StateError whenever called, except when called to create an ExistingDartDevelopmentServiceException.

• Added missing type to Event in postEvent.
• [DAP] Instaces with both fields and getters of the same name will no longer show duplicates in variables responses.
• bin/dds.dart now closes the stderr pipe after writing its JSON to the stream.

• Added missing await of WebSocketChannel.ready in startDartDevelopmentService.

• [DAP] Exceptions that occur while the debug adapter is connecting to the VM Service and configuring isolates will no longer cause the debug adapter to terminate. Instead, the errors are reporting via a console OutputEvent and the adapter will shut down gracefully.

• [DAP]: Fixed an issue where breakpoint changed events might contain incorrect location information when new isolates are created, causing breakpoints to appear to move in the editor.
• [DAP]: For consistency with other values, automatic toString() invocations for debugger views no longer expand long strings and instead show truncated values. Full values continue to be returned for evaluation (context=="repl") and when copying to the clipboard (context=="clipboard").
• [DAP]: Improved handling of sentinel responses when building variables responses. This prevents entire map/list requests from failing when only some values inside are sentinels.
• [DAP] Set requirePermissionToResume and requireUserPermissionToResume for onPauseStart and onPauseExit so that DDS waits for DAP's permission before resuming the isolate.

• [DAP] All OutputEvents are now scanned for stack frames to attach source metadata to. The [parseStackFrames] parameter for sendOutput is ignored and deprecated.

• Internal change: removed static method DevToolsUtils.initializeAnalytics and prepared DDS for using unified_analytics through the Dart Tooling Daemon.
• Internal change: removed analytics parameter from the DevTools server defaultHandler method.
• Updated README.md and added contributing guide (CONTRIBUTING.md).
• Updated package:dds_service_extensions constraint to ^2.0.0.
• Determine default requireUserPermissionToResume values from the pause_isolates_on_start and pause_isolates_on_exit flags.
• Indicate compatibility with package:web_socket_channel 2.x and 3.x
• Indicate compatibility with package:shelf_web_socket 1.x and 2.x
• Updated the devtools_shared dependency to version ^9.0.1.
• Remove the package:unified_analytics dependency.
• Serve DevTools extensions from their absolute location.

• Updated DDS protocol to version 2.0.
• Added readyToResume and requireUserPermissionToResume RPCs.
• Breaking change: resume is now treated as a user-initiated resume request and force resumes paused isolates, regardless of required resume approvals. Tooling relying on resume permissions should use the readyToResume RPC to indicate to DDS that they are ready to resume.

Language

Dart 3.4 makes improvements to the type analysis of conditional expressions (e1 ? e2 : e3), if-null expressions (e1 ?? e2), if-null assignments (e1 ??= e2), and switch expressions (switch (e) { p1 => e1, ... }). To take advantage of these improvements, set your package's SDK constraint lower bound to 3.4 or greater (sdk: '^3.4.0').

• Breaking Change #54640: The pattern context type schema for cast patterns has been changed from Object? to _ (the unknown type), to align with the specification. This change is not expected to make any difference in practice.

• Breaking Change #54828: The type schema used by the compiler front end to perform type inference on the operand of a null-aware spread operator (...?) in map and set literals has been made nullable, to match what currently happens in list literals. This makes the compiler front end behavior consistent with that of the analyzer. This change is expected to be very low impact.

Libraries

dart:async

• Added option for ParallelWaitError to get some meta-information that it can expose in its toString, and the Iterable<Future>.wait and (Future,...,Future).wait extension methods now provide that information. Should make a ParallelWaitError easier to log.

dart:cli

• Breaking change [#52121][]: waitFor is removed in 3.4.

dart:ffi

• Added Struct.create and Union.create to create struct and union views of the sequence of bytes stored in a subtype of TypedData.

dart:io

• Breaking change #53863: Stdout has a new field lineTerminator, which allows developers to control the line ending used by stdout and stderr. Classes that implement Stdout must define the lineTerminator field. The default semantics of stdout and stderr are not changed.

• Deprecates FileSystemDeleteEvent.isDirectory, which always returns false.

dart:js_interop

• Fixes an issue with several comparison operators in JSAnyOperatorExtension that were declared to return JSBoolean but really returned bool. This led to runtime errors when trying to use the return values. The implementation now returns a JSBoolean to align with the interface. See issue #55024 for more details.

• Added ExternalDartReference and related conversion functions toExternalReference and toDartObject. This is a faster alternative to JSBoxedDartObject, but with fewer safety guarantees and fewer interoperability capabilities. See #55187 for more details.

• On dart2wasm, JSBoxedDartObject now is an actual JS object that wraps the opaque Dart value instead of only externalizing the value. Like the JS backends, you'll now get a more useful error when trying to use it in another Dart runtime.

• Added isA helper to make type checks easier with interop types. See #54138 for more details.

dart:typed_data

• BREAKING CHANGE #53218 #53785: The unmodifiable view classes for typed data are deprecated.

  To create an unmodifiable view of a typed-data object, use the asUnmodifiableView() methods added in Dart 3.3:

  Uint8List data = ...;
  final readOnlyView = data.asUnmodifiableView();
  // readOnlyView has type Uint8List, and throws if attempted modified.
  

  The reason for this change is to allow more flexibility in the implementation of typed data, so the native and web platforms can use different strategies to ensure that typed data has good performance.

  The deprecated types will be removed in Dart 3.5.

Tools

Analyzer

• Improved code completion. Fixed over 50% of completion correctness bugs, tagged analyzer-completion-correctness in the issue tracker.

• Support for new annotations introduced in version 1.14.0 of the meta package.

  • Support for the @doNotSubmit annotation, noting that any usage of an annotated member should not be submitted to source control.

  • Support for the @mustBeConst annotation, which indicates that an annotated parameter only accepts constant arguments.

Linter

• Added the unnecessary_library_name lint.
• Added the missing_code_block_language_in_doc_comment lint.

Compilers

• The compilation environment will no longer pretend to contain entries with value "" for all dart.library.foo strings, where dart:foo is not an available library. Instead there will only be entries for the available libraries, like dart.library.core, where the value was, and still is, "true". This should have no effect on const bool.fromEnvironment(...) or const String.fromEnvironment(...) without a defaultValue argument, an argument which was always ignored previously. It changes the behavior of const bool.hasEnvironment(...) on such an input, away from always being true and therefore useless.

DevTools

• Updated DevTools to version 2.33.0 from 2.31.1. To learn more, check out the release notes for versions 2.32.0 and 2.33.0.

Pub

• Dependency resolution and dart pub outdated will now surface if a dependency is affected by a security advisory, unless the advisory is listed under a ignored_advisories section in the pubspec.yaml file. To learn more about pub's support for security advisories, visit dart.dev/go/pub-security-advisories.

• path-dependencies inside git-dependencies are now resolved relative to the git repo.

• All dart pub commands can now be run from any subdirectory of a project. Pub will find the first parent directory with a pubspec.yaml and operate relative it.

• New command dart pub unpack that downloads a package from pub.dev and extracts it to a subfolder of the current directory.

  This can be useful for inspecting the code, or playing with examples.

Dart Runtime

• Dart VM flags and options can now be provided to any executable generated using dart compile exe via the DART_VM_OPTIONS environment variable. DART_VM_OPTIONS should be set to a list of comma-separated flags and options with no whitespace. Options that allow for multiple values to be provided as comma-separated values are not supported (e.g., --timeline-streams=Dart,GC,Compiler).

  Example of a valid DART_VM_OPTIONS environment variable:

  DART_VM_OPTIONS=--random_seed=42,--verbose_gc
  

• Dart VM no longer supports external strings: Dart_IsExternalString, Dart_NewExternalLatin1String and Dart_NewExternalUTF16String functions are removed from Dart C API.

This is a patch release that:

• Fixes an issue in dart2js where object literal constructors in interop extension types would fail to compile without an @JS annotation on the library (issue #55057).
• Disallows certain types involving extension types from being used as the operand of an await expression, unless the extension type itself implements Future (issue #55095).

Language

Dart 3.3 adds extension types to the language. To use them, set your package's [SDK constraint][language version] lower bound to 3.3 or greater (sdk: '^3.3.0').

Extension types

An extension type wraps an existing type with a different, static-only interface. It works in a way which is in many ways similar to a class that contains a single final instance variable holding the wrapped object, but without the space and time overhead of an actual wrapper object.

Extension types are introduced by extension type declarations. Each such declaration declares a new named type (not just a new name for the same type). It declares a representation variable whose type is the representation type. The effect of using an extension type is that the representation (that is, the value of the representation variable) has the members declared by the extension type rather than the members declared by its "own" type (the representation type). Example:

extension type Meters(int value) {
  String get label => '${value}m';
  Meters operator +(Meters other) => Meters(value + other.value);
}

void main() {
  var m = Meters(42); // Has type `Meters`.
  var m2 = m + m; // OK, type `Meters`.
  // int i = m; // Compile-time error, wrong type.
  // m.isEven; // Compile-time error, no such member.
  assert(identical(m, m.value)); // Succeeds.
}

The declaration Meters is an extension type that has representation type int. It introduces an implicit constructor Meters(int value); and a getter int get value. m and m.value is the very same object, but m has type Meters and m.value has type int. The point is that m has the members of Meters and m.value has the members of int.

Extension types are entirely static, they do not exist at run time. If o is the value of an expression whose static type is an extension type E with representation type R, then o is just a normal object whose run-time type is a subtype of R, exactly like the value of an expression of type R. Also the run-time value of E is R (for example, E == R is true). In short: At run time, an extension type is erased to the corresponding representation type.

A method call on an expression of an extension type is resolved at compile-time, based on the static type of the receiver, similar to how extension method calls work. There is no virtual or dynamic dispatch. This, combined with no memory overhead, means that extension types are zero-cost wrappers around their representation value.

While there is thus no performance cost to using extension types, there is a safety cost. Since extension types are erased at compile time, run-time type tests on values that are statically typed as an extension type will check the type of the representation object instead, and if the type check looks like it tests for an extension type, like is Meters, it actually checks for the representation type, that is, it works exactly like is int at run time. Moreover, as mentioned above, if an extension type is used as a type argument to a generic class or function, the type variable will be bound to the representation type at run time. For example:

void main() {
  var meters = Meters(3);

  // At run time, `Meters` is just `int`.
  print(meters is int); // Prints "true".
  print(<Meters>[] is List<int>); // Prints "true".

  // An explicit cast is allowed and succeeds as well:
  List<Meters> meterList = <int>[1, 2, 3] as List<Meters>;
  print(meterList[1].label); // Prints "2m".
}

Extension types are useful when you are willing to sacrifice some run-time encapsulation in order to avoid the overhead of wrapping values in instances of wrapper classes, but still want to provide a different interface than the wrapped object. An example of that is interop, where you may have data that are not Dart objects to begin with (for example, raw JavaScript objects when using JavaScript interop), and you may have large collections of objects where it's not efficient to allocate an extra object for each element.

Other changes

• Breaking Change #54056: The rules for private field promotion have been changed so that an abstract getter is considered promotable if there are no conflicting declarations. There are no conflicting declarations if there are no non-final fields, external fields, concrete getters, or noSuchMethod forwarding getters with the same name in the same library. This makes the implementation more consistent and allows type promotion in a few rare scenarios where it wasn't previously allowed. It is unlikely, but this change could cause a breakage by changing an inferred type in a way that breaks later code. For example:

  class A {
    int? get _field;
  }
  class B extends A {
    final int? _field;
    B(this._field);
  }
  test(A a) {
    if (a._field != null) {
      var x = a._field; // Previously had type `int?`; now has type `int`
      ...
      x = null; // Previously allowed; now causes a compile-time error.
    }
  }
  

  Affected code can be fixed by adding an explicit type annotation. For example, in the above snippet, var x can be changed to int? x.

  It's also possible that some continuous integration configurations might fail if they have been configured to treat warnings as errors, because the expanded type promotion could lead to one of the following warnings:

  • unnecessary_non_null_assertion
  • unnecessary_cast
  • invalid_null_aware_operator

  These warnings can be addressed in the usual way, by removing the unnecessary operation in the first two cases, or changing ?. to . in the third case.

  To learn more about other rules surrounding type promotion, check out the guide on Fixing type promotion failures.

Libraries

dart:core

• String.fromCharCodes now allow start and end to be after the end of the Iterable argument, just like skip and take does on an Iterable.

dart:ffi

• In addition to functions, @Native can now be used on fields.
• Allow taking the address of native functions and fields via Native.addressOf.
• The elementAt pointer arithmetic extension methods on core Pointer types are now deprecated. Migrate to the new - and + operators instead.
• The experimental and deprecated @FfiNative annotation has been removed. Usages should be updated to use the @Native annotation.

dart:js_interop

• Breaking Change in the representation of JS types #52687: JS types like JSAny were previously represented using a custom erasure of @staticInterop types that were compiler-specific. They are now represented as extension types where their representation types are compiler-specific. This means that user-defined @staticInterop types that implemented JSAny or JSObject can no longer do so and need to use JSObject.fromInteropObject. Going forward, it's recommended to use extension types to define interop APIs. Those extension types can still implement JS types.
• JSArray and JSPromise generics: JSArray and JSPromise are now generic types whose type parameter is a subtype of JSAny?. Conversions to and from these types are changed to account for the type parameters of the Dart or JS type, respectively.
• Breaking Change in names of extensions: Some dart:js_interop extension members are moved to different extensions on the same type or a supertype to better organize the API surface. See JSAnyUtilityExtension and JSAnyOperatorExtension for the new extensions. This shouldn't make a difference unless the extension names were explicitly used.
• Add importModule to allow users to dynamically import modules using the JS import() expression.

dart:js_interop_unsafe

• Add has helper to make hasProperty calls more concise.

dart:typed_data

• BREAKING CHANGE (https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/53218) The unmodifiable view classes for typed data are deprecated. Instead of using the constructors for these classes to create an unmodifiable view, e.g.

  Uint8List data = ...
  final readOnlyView = UnmodifiableUint8ListView(data);
  

  use the new asUnmodifiableView() methods:

  Uint8List data = ...
  final readOnlyView = data.asUnmodifiableView();
  

  The reason for this change is to allow more flexibility in the implementation of typed data so the native and web platforms can use different strategies for ensuring typed data has good performance.

  The deprecated types will be removed in a future Dart version.

dart:nativewrappers

• Breaking Change #51896: The NativeWrapperClasses are marked base so that none of their subtypes can be implemented. Implementing subtypes can lead to crashes when passing such native wrapper to a native call, as it will try to unwrap a native field that doesn't exist.

Tools

Dart command line

• The dart create command now uses v3 of package:lints, including multiple new recommended lints by default. To learn more about the updated collection of lints, check out the package:lints 3.0.0 changelog entry.

DevTools

• Updated DevTools to version 2.31.1 from 2.28.1. To learn more, check out the release notes for versions 2.29.0, 2.30.0, and 2.31.0.

Wasm compiler (dart2wasm)

• Breaking Change #54004: dart:js_util, package:js, and dart:js are now disallowed from being imported when compiling with dart2wasm. Prefer using dart:js_interop and dart:js_interop_unsafe.

Development JavaScript compiler (DDC)

• Type arguments of package:js interop types are now printed as any instead of being omitted. This is simply a change to the textual representation of package js types that have type arguments. These type arguments are still completely ignored by the type system at runtime.

• Removed "implements <...>" text from the Chrome custom formatter display for Dart classes. This information provides little value and keeping it imposes an unnecessary maintenance cost.

Production JavaScript compiler (dart2js)

• Breaking Change #54201: The Invocation that is passed to noSuchMethod will no longer have a minified memberName, even when dart2js is invoked with --minify. See #54201 for more details.

Analyzer

• You can now suppress diagnostics in pubspec.yaml files by adding an # ignore: <diagnostic_id> comment.
• Invalid dart doc comment directives are now reported.
• The flutter_style_todos lint now has a quick fix.

Linter

• Removed the iterable_contains_unrelated_type and list_remove_unrelated_type lints. Consider migrating to the expanded collection_methods_unrelated_type lint.
• Removed various lints that are no longer necessary with sound null safety:
  • always_require_non_null_named_parameters
  • avoid_returning_null,
  • avoid_returning_null_for_future

This is a patch release that:

• Fixes the left/mobile sidebar being empty on non-class pages in documentation generated with dart doc (issue #54073).

• Fixes a JSON array parsing bug that causes a segmentation fault when flutter test is invoked with the --coverage flag (SDK issue #54059, Flutter issue #124145).

• Upgrades Dart DevTools to version 2.28.3 (issue #54085).

Language

Dart 3.2 adds the following features. To use them, set your package's SDK constraint lower bound to 3.2 or greater (sdk: '^3.2.0').

• Private field promotion: In most circumstances, the types of private final fields can now be promoted by null checks and is tests. For example:

  class Example {
    final int? _privateField;
    Example(this._privateField);
  
    f() {
      if (_privateField != null) {
        // _privateField has now been promoted; you can use it without
        // null checking it.
        int i = _privateField; // OK
      }
    }
  }
  
  // Private field promotions also work from outside of the class:
  f(Example x) {
    if (x._privateField != null) {
      int i = x._privateField; // OK
    }
  }
  

  To ensure soundness, a field is not eligible for field promotion in the following circumstances:

  • If it's not final (because a non-final field could be changed in between the test and the usage, invalidating the promotion).
  • If it's overridden elsewhere in the library by a concrete getter or a non-final field (because an access to an overridden field might resolve at runtime to the overriding getter or field).
  • If it's not private (because a non-private field might be overridden elsewhere in the program).
  • If it has the same name as a concrete getter or a non-final field in some other unrelated class in the library (because a class elsewhere in the program might extend one of the classes and implement the other, creating an override relationship between them).
  • If there is a concrete class C in the library whose interface contains a getter with the same name, but C does not have an implementation of that getter (such unimplemented getters aren't safe for field promotion, because they are implicitly forwarded to noSuchMethod, which might not return the same value each time it's called).

• Breaking Change #53167: Use a more precise split point for refutable patterns. Previously, in an if-case statement, if flow analysis could prove that the scrutinee expression was guaranteed to throw an exception, it would sometimes fail to propagate type promotions implied by the pattern to the (dead) code that follows. This change makes the type promotion behavior of if-case statements consistent regardless of whether the scrutinee expression throws an exception.

  No live code is affected by this change, but there is a small chance that the change in types will cause a compile-time error to appear in some dead code in the user's project, where no compile-time error appeared previously.

Libraries

dart:async

• Added broadcast parameter to Stream.empty constructor.

dart:cli

• Breaking change #52121:
  • waitFor is disabled by default and slated for removal in 3.4. Attempting to call this function will now throw an exception. Users that still depend on waitFor can enable it by passing --enable_deprecated_wait_for flag to the VM.

dart:convert

• Breaking change #52801:
  • Changed return types of utf8.encode() and Utf8Codec.encode() from List<int> to Uint8List.

dart:developer

• Deprecated the Service.getIsolateID method.
• Added getIsolateId method to Service.
• Added getObjectId method to Service.

dart:ffi

• Added the NativeCallable.isolateLocal constructor. This creates NativeCallables with the same functionality as Pointer.fromFunction, except that NativeCallable accepts closures.
• Added the NativeCallable.keepIsolateAlive method, which determines whether the NativeCallable keeps the isolate that created it alive.
• All NativeCallable constructors can now accept closures. Previously NativeCallables had the same restrictions as Pointer.fromFunction, and could only create callbacks for static functions.
• Breaking change #53311: NativeCallable.nativeFunction now throws an error if is called after the NativeCallable has already been closed. Calls to close after the first are now ignored.

dart:io

• Breaking change #53005: The headers returned by HttpClientResponse.headers and HttpRequest.headers no longer include trailing whitespace in their values.

• Breaking change #53227: Folded headers values returned by HttpClientResponse.headers and HttpRequest.headers now have a space inserted at the fold point.

dart:isolate

• Added Isolate.packageConfigSync and Isolate.resolvePackageUriSync APIs.

dart:js_interop

• Breaking Change on JSNumber.toDart and Object.toJS: JSNumber.toDart is removed in favor of toDartDouble and toDartInt to make the type explicit. Object.toJS is also removed in favor of Object.toJSBox. Previously, this function would allow Dart objects to flow into JS unwrapped on the JS backends. Now, there's an explicit wrapper that is added and unwrapped via JSBoxedDartObject.toDart. Similarly, JSExportedDartObject is renamed to JSBoxedDartObject and the extensions ObjectToJSExportedDartObject and JSExportedDartObjectToObject are renamed to ObjectToJSBoxedDartObject and JSBoxedDartObjectToObject in order to avoid confusion with @JSExport.
• Type parameters in external APIs: Type parameters must now be bound to a static interop type or one of the dart:js_interop types like JSNumber when used in an external API. This only affects dart:js_interop classes and not package:js or other forms of JS interop.
• Subtyping dart:js_interop types: @staticInterop types can subtype only JSObject and JSAny from the set of JS types in dart:js_interop. Subtyping other types from dart:js_interop would result in confusing type errors before, so this makes it a static error.
• Global context of dart:js_interop and @staticInterop APIs: Static interop APIs will now use the same global context as non-static interop instead of globalThis to avoid a greater migration. Static interop APIs, either through dart:js_interop or the @staticInterop annotation, have used JavaScript's globalThis as the global context. This is relevant to things like external top-level members or external constructors, as this is the root context we expect those members to reside in. Historically, this was not the case in dart2js and DDC. We used either self or DDC's global in non-static interop APIs with package:js. So, static interop APIs will now use one of those global contexts. Functionally, this should matter in only a very small number of cases, like when using older browser versions. dart:js_interop's globalJSObject is also renamed to globalContext and returns the global context used in the lowerings.
• Breaking Change on Types of dart:js_interop External APIs: External JS interop APIs when using dart:js_interop are restricted to a set of allowed types. Namely, this includes the primitive types like String, JS types from dart:js_interop, and other static interop types (either through @staticInterop or extension types).
• Breaking Change on dart:js_interop isNull and isUndefined: null and undefined can only be discerned in the JS backends. dart2wasm conflates the two values and treats them both as Dart null. Therefore, these two helper methods should not be used on dart2wasm and will throw to avoid potentially erroneous code.
• Breaking Change on dart:js_interop typeofEquals and instanceof: Both APIs now return a bool instead of a JSBoolean. typeofEquals also now takes in a String instead of a JSString.
• Breaking Change on dart:js_interop JSAny and JSObject: These types can only be implemented, and no longer extended, by user @staticInterop types.
• Breaking Change on dart:js_interop JSArray.withLength: This API now takes in an int instead of JSNumber.

Tools

Development JavaScript compiler (DDC)

• Applications compiled by DDC will no longer add members to the native JavaScript Object prototype.
• Breaking change for JS interop with Symbols and BigInts: JavaScript Symbols and BigInts are now associated with their own interceptor and should not be used with package:js classes. These types were being intercepted with the assumption that they are a subtype of JavaScript's Object, but this is incorrect. This lead to erroneous behavior when using these types as Dart Objects. See #53106 for more details. Use dart:js_interop's JSSymbol and JSBigInt with extension types to interop with these types.

Production JavaScript compiler (dart2js)

• Breaking change for JS interop with Symbols and BigInts: JavaScript Symbols and BigInts are now associated with their own interceptor and should not be used with package:js classes. These types were being intercepted with the assumption that they are a subtype of JavaScript's Object, but this is incorrect. This lead to erroneous behavior when using these types as Dart Objects. See #53106 for more details. Use dart:js_interop's JSSymbol and JSBigInt with extension types to interop with these types.

Dart command line

• The dart create command has a new cli template to quickly create Dart command-line applications with basic argument parsing capabilities. To learn more about using the template, run dart help create.

Dart format

• Always split enum declarations containing a line comment.
• Fix regression in splitting type annotations with library prefixes.
• Support --enable-experiment command-line option to enable language experiments.

DevTools

• Incorporated the 2.26.1, 2.27.0, and 2.28.1 releases of DevTools.

Linter

• Added the experimental annotate_redeclares lint.
• Marked the use_build_context_synchronously lint as stable.

Pub

• New option dart pub upgrade --tighten which will update dependencies' lower bounds in pubspec.yaml to match the current version.
• The commands dart pub get/add/upgrade will now show if a dependency changed between direct, dev and transitive dependency.
• The command dart pub upgrade no longer shows unchanged dependencies.

This is a patch release that:

• Fixes a bug in dart2js which crashed the compiler when a typed record pattern was used outside the scope of a function body, such as in a field initializer. For example final x = { for (var (int a,) in someList) a: a }; (issue #53449)

• Fixes an expedient issue of users seeing an unhandled exception pause in the debugger, please see https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/53450 for more details. The fix uses try/catch in lookupAddresses instead of Future error so that we don't see an unhandled exception pause in the debugger (issue #53450)

This is a patch release that:

• Fixes a bug in the parser which prevented a record pattern from containing a nested record pattern, where the nested record pattern uses record destructuring shorthand syntax, for example final ((:a, :b), c) = record; (issue #53352).

Libraries

dart:async

• Breaking change #52334:
  • Added the interface modifier to purely abstract classes: MultiStreamController, StreamConsumer, StreamIterator and StreamTransformer. As a result, these types can only be implemented, not extended or mixed in.

dart:core

• Uri.base on native platforms now respects IOOverrides overriding current directory (#39796).

dart:ffi

• Added the NativeCallable class, which can be used to create callbacks that allow native code to call into Dart code from any thread. See NativeCallable.listener. In future releases, NativeCallable will be updated with more functionality, and will become the recommended way of creating native callbacks for all use cases, replacing Pointer.fromFunction.

dart:io

• Breaking change #51486:
  • Added sameSite to the Cookie class.
  • Added class SameSite.
• Breaking change #52027: FileSystemEvent is sealed. This means that FileSystemEvent cannot be extended or implemented.
• Added a deprecation warning when Platform is instantiated.
• Added Platform.lineTerminator which exposes the character or characters that the operating system uses to separate lines of text, e.g., "\r\n" on Windows.

dart:js_interop

• Object literal constructors: ObjectLiteral is removed from dart:js_interop. It's no longer needed in order to declare an object literal constructor with inline classes. As long as an external constructor has at least one named parameter, it'll be treated as an object literal constructor. If you want to create an object literal with no named members, use {}.jsify().

Other libraries

package:js

• Breaking change to @staticInterop and external extension members: external @staticInterop members and external extension members can no longer be used as tear-offs. Declare a closure or a non-external method that calls these members, and use that instead.
• Breaking change to @staticInterop and external extension members: external @staticInterop members and external extension members will generate slightly different JS code for methods that have optional parameters. Whereas before, the JS code passed in the default value for missing optionals, it will now pass in only the provided members. This aligns with how JS parameters work, where omitted parameters are actually omitted. For example, calling external void foo([int a, int b]) as foo(0) will now result in foo(0), and not foo(0, null).

Tools

DevTools

• Incorporated the 2.24.0 and 2.25.0 releases of DevTools.

Linter

• Added new static analysis lints you can enable in your package's analysis_options.yaml file:
  • no_self_assignments
  • no_wildcard_variable_uses

Hot-fix release of changes in 3.1.2 without the changes in 3.1.1

• Improved error handling for serving static DevTools assets.
• Updated devtools_shared constraint to ^6.0.3.
• [DAP] The error message shown when global evaluation is unavailable been improved.
• [DAP] Error messages shown on the client no longer contain verbose stack traces (although they are still included in the JSON payloads).
• [DAP] stackTraceRequest now returns an empty stack instead of throwing if called for a thread that has exited.
• [DAP] Fixed an issue that could cause a crash during shutdown if an isolate was being resumed.

Language

Dart 3.0 adds the following features. To use them, set your package's SDK constraint lower bound to 3.0 or greater (sdk: '^3.0.0').

• Records: Records are anonymous immutable data structures that let you aggregate multiple values together, similar to tuples in other languages. With records, you can return multiple values from a function, create composite map keys, or use them any other place where you want to bundle a couple of objects together.

  For example, using a record to return two values:

  (double x, double y) geoLocation(String name) {
    if (name == 'Nairobi') {
      return (-1.2921, 36.8219);
    } else {
      ...
    }
  }
  

• Pattern matching: Expressions build values out of smaller pieces. Conversely, patterns are an expressive tool for decomposing values back into their constituent parts. Patterns can call getters on an object, access elements from a list, pull fields out of a record, etc. For example, we can destructure the record from the previous example like so:

  var (lat, long) = geoLocation('Nairobi');
  print('Nairobi is at $lat, $long.');
  

  Patterns can also be used in switch cases. There, you can destructure values and also test them to see if they have a certain type or value:

  switch (object) {
    case [int a]:
      print('A list with a single integer element $a');
    case ('name', _):
      print('A two-element record whose first field is "name".');
    default: print('Some other object.');
  }
  

  Also, as you can see, non-empty switch cases no longer need break; statements.

  Breaking change: Dart 3.0 interprets switch cases as patterns instead of constant expressions. Most constant expressions found in switch cases are valid patterns with the same meaning (named constants, literals, etc.). You may need to tweak a few constant expressions to make them valid. This only affects libraries that have upgraded to language version 3.0.

• Switch expressions: Switch expressions allow you to use patterns and multi-way branching in contexts where a statement isn't allowed:

  return TextButton(
    onPressed: _goPrevious,
    child: Text(switch (page) {
      0 => 'Exit story',
      1 => 'First page',
      _ when page == _lastPage => 'Start over',
      _ => 'Previous page',
    }),
  );
  

• If-case statements and elements: A new if construct that matches a value against a pattern and executes the then or else branch depending on whether the pattern matches:

  if (json case ['user', var name]) {
    print('Got user message for user $name.');
  }
  

  There is also a corresponding if-case element that can be used in collection literals.

• Sealed classes: When you mark a type sealed, the compiler ensures that switches on values of that type exhaustively cover every subtype. This enables you to program in an algebraic datatype style with the compile-time safety you expect:

  sealed class Amigo {}
  class Lucky extends Amigo {}
  class Dusty extends Amigo {}
  class Ned extends Amigo {}
  
  String lastName(Amigo amigo) =>
      switch (amigo) {
        Lucky _ => 'Day',
        Ned _   => 'Nederlander',
      };
  

  In this last example, the compiler reports an error that the switch doesn't cover the subclass Dusty.

• Class modifiers: New modifiers final, interface, base, and mixin on class and mixin declarations let you control how the type can be used. By default, Dart is flexible in that a single class declaration can be used as an interface, a superclass, or even a mixin. This flexibility can make it harder to evolve an API over time without breaking users. We mostly keep the current flexible defaults, but these new modifiers give you finer-grained control over how the type can be used.

  Breaking change: Class declarations from libraries that have been upgraded to Dart 3.0 can no longer be used as mixins by default. If you want the class to be usable as both a class and a mixin, mark it mixin class. If you want it to be used only as a mixin, make it a mixin declaration. If you haven't upgraded a class to Dart 3.0, you can still use it as a mixin.

• Breaking change #50902: Dart reports a compile-time error if a continue statement targets a label that is not a loop (for, do and while statements) or a switch member. Fix this by changing the continue to target a valid labeled statement.

• Breaking change language/#2357: Starting in language version 3.0, Dart reports a compile-time error if a colon (:) is used as the separator before the default value of an optional named parameter. Fix this by changing the colon (:) to an equal sign (=).

Libraries

General changes

• Breaking Change: Non-mixin classes in the platform libraries can no longer be mixed in, unless they are explicitly marked as mixin class. The following existing classes have been made mixin classes:
  • Iterable
  • IterableMixin (now alias for Iterable)
  • IterableBase (now alias for Iterable)
  • ListMixin
  • SetMixin
  • MapMixin
  • LinkedListEntry
  • StringConversionSink

dart:core

• Added bool.parse and bool.tryParse static methods.

• Added DateTime.timestamp() constructor to get current time as UTC.

• The type of RegExpMatch.pattern is now RegExp, not just Pattern.

• Breaking change #49529:

  • Removed the deprecated List constructor, as it wasn't null safe. Use list literals (e.g. [] for an empty list or <int>[] for an empty typed list) or List.filled.
  • Removed the deprecated onError argument on int.parse, double.parse, and num.parse. Use the tryParse method instead.
  • Removed the deprecated proxy and Provisional annotations. The original proxy annotation has no effect in Dart 2, and the Provisional type and provisional constant were only used internally during the Dart 2.0 development process.
  • Removed the deprecated Deprecated.expires getter. Use Deprecated.message instead.
  • Removed the deprecated CastError error. Use TypeError instead.
  • Removed the deprecated FallThroughError error. The kind of fall-through previously throwing this error was made a compile-time error in Dart 2.0.
  • Removed the deprecated NullThrownError error. This error is never thrown from null safe code.
  • Removed the deprecated AbstractClassInstantiationError error. It was made a compile-time error to call the constructor of an abstract class in Dart 2.0.
  • Removed the deprecated CyclicInitializationError. Cyclic dependencies are no longer detected at runtime in null safe code. Such code will fail in other ways instead, possibly with a StackOverflowError.
  • Removed the deprecated NoSuchMethodError default constructor. Use the NoSuchMethodError.withInvocation named constructor instead.
  • Removed the deprecated BidirectionalIterator class. Existing bidirectional iterators can still work, they just don't have a shared supertype locking them to a specific name for moving backwards.

• Breaking change when migrating code to Dart 3.0: Some changes to platform libraries only affect code when that code is migrated to language version 3.0.

  • The Function type can no longer be implemented, extended or mixed in. Since Dart 2.0 writing implements Function has been allowed for backwards compatibility, but it has not had any effect. In Dart 3.0, the Function type is final and cannot be subtyped, preventing code from mistakenly assuming it works.

  • The following declarations can only be implemented, not extended:

    • Comparable
    • Exception
    • Iterator
    • Pattern
    • Match
    • RegExp
    • RegExpMatch
    • StackTrace
    • StringSink

    None of these declarations contained any implementation to inherit, and are marked as interface to signify that they are only intended as interfaces.

  • The following declarations can no longer be implemented or extended:

    • MapEntry
    • OutOfMemoryError
    • StackOverflowError
    • Expando
    • WeakReference
    • Finalizer

    The MapEntry value class is restricted to enable later optimizations. The remaining classes are tightly coupled to the platform and not intended to be subclassed or implemented.

dart:async

• Added extension member wait on iterables and 2-9 tuples of futures.

• Breaking change #49529:

  • Removed the deprecated DeferredLibrary class. Use the deferred as import syntax instead.

dart:collection

• Added extension members nonNulls, firstOrNull, lastOrNull, singleOrNull, elementAtOrNull and indexed on Iterables. Also exported from dart:core.

• Deprecated the HasNextIterator class (#50883).

• Breaking change when migrating code to Dart 3.0: Some changes to platform libraries only affect code when it is migrated to language version 3.0.

  • The following interface can no longer be extended, only implemented:
    • Queue
  • The following implementation classes can no longer be implemented:
    • LinkedList
    • LinkedListEntry
  • The following implementation classes can no longer be implemented or extended:
    • HasNextIterator (Also deprecated.)
    • HashMap
    • LinkedHashMap
    • HashSet
    • LinkedHashSet
    • DoubleLinkedQueue
    • ListQueue
    • SplayTreeMap
    • SplayTreeSet

dart:developer

• Breaking change #49529:

  • Removed the deprecated MAX_USER_TAGS constant. Use maxUserTags instead.

• Callbacks passed to registerExtension will be run in the zone from which they are registered.

• Breaking change #50231:

  • Removed the deprecated Metrics, Metric, Counter, and Gauge classes as they have been broken since Dart 2.0.

dart:ffi

• The experimental @FfiNative annotation is now deprecated. Usages should be replaced with the new @Native annotation.

dart:html

• Breaking change: As previously announced, the deprecated registerElement and registerElement2 methods in Document and HtmlDocument have been removed. See #49536 for details.

dart:math

• Breaking change when migrating code to Dart 3.0: Some changes to platform libraries only affect code when it is migrated to language version 3.0.
  • The Random interface can only be implemented, not extended.

dart:io

• Added name and signalNumber to the ProcessSignal class.
• Deprecate NetworkInterface.listSupported. Has always returned true since Dart 2.3.
• Finalize httpEnableTimelineLogging parameter name transition from enable to enabled. See #43638.
• Favor IPv4 connections over IPv6 when connecting sockets. See #50868.
• Breaking change #51035:
  • Update NetworkProfiling to accommodate new String ids that are introduced in vm_service:11.0.0

dart:js_util

• Added several helper functions to access more JavaScript operators, like delete and the typeof functionality.
• jsify is now permissive and has inverse semantics to dartify.
• jsify and dartify both handle types they understand natively more efficiently.
• Signature of callMethod has been aligned with the other methods and now takes Object instead of String.

Tools

Observatory

• Observatory is no longer served by default and users should instead use Dart DevTools. Users requiring specific functionality in Observatory should set the --serve-observatory flag.

Web Dev Compiler (DDC)

• Removed deprecated command line flags -k, --kernel, and --dart-sdk.
• The compile time flag --nativeNonNullAsserts, which ensures web library APIs are sound in their nullability, is by default set to true in sound mode. For more information on the flag, see NATIVE_NULL_ASSERTIONS.md.

dart2js

• The compile time flag --native-null-assertions, which ensures web library APIs are sound in their nullability, is by default set to true in sound mode, unless -O3 or higher is passed, in which case they are not checked. For more information on the flag, see NATIVE_NULL_ASSERTIONS.md.

Dart2js

• Cleanup related to #46100: the internal dart2js snapshot fails unless it is called from a supported interface, such as dart compile js, flutter build, or build_web_compilers. This is not expected to be a visible change.

Formatter

• Format sync* and async* functions with => bodies.
• Don't split after < in collection literals.
• Better indentation of multiline function types inside type argument lists.
• Fix bug where parameter metadata wouldn't always split when it should.

Analyzer

• Most static analysis "hints" are converted to be "warnings," and any remaining hints are intended to be converted soon after the Dart 3.0 release. This means that any (previously) hints reported by dart analyze are now considered "fatal" (will result in a non-zero exit code). The previous behavior, where such hints (now warnings) are not fatal, can be achieved by using the --no-fatal-warnings flag. This behavior can also be altered, on a code-by-code basis, by changing the severity of rules in an analysis options file.
• Add static enforcement of the SDK-only @Since annotation. When code in a package uses a Dart SDK element annotated with @Since, analyzer will report a warning if the package's Dart SDK constraint allows versions of Dart which don't include that element.
• Protects the Dart Analysis Server against extreme memory usage by limiting the number of plugins per analysis context to 1. (issue [#50981][]).

Linter

Updates the Linter to 1.35.0, which includes changes that

• add new lints:
  • implicit_reopen
  • unnecessary_breaks
  • type_literal_in_constant_pattern
  • invalid_case_patterns
• update existing lints to support patterns and class modifiers
• remove support for:
  • enable_null_safety
  • invariant_booleans
  • prefer_bool_in_asserts
  • prefer_equal_for_default_values
  • super_goes_last
• fix unnecessary_parenthesis false-positives with null-aware expressions.
• fix void_checks to allow assignments of Future<dynamic>? to parameters typed FutureOr<void>?.
• fix use_build_context_synchronously in if conditions.
• fix a false positive for avoid_private_typedef_functions with generalized type aliases.
• update unnecessary_parenthesis to detect some doubled parens.
• update void_checks to allow returning Never as void.
• update no_adjacent_strings_in_list to support set literals and for- and if-elements.
• update avoid_types_as_parameter_names to handle type variables.
• update avoid_positional_boolean_parameters to handle typedefs.
• update avoid_redundant_argument_values to check parameters of redirecting constructors.
• improve performance for prefer_const_literals_to_create_immutables.
• update use_build_context_synchronously to check context properties.
• improve unnecessary_parenthesis support for property accesses and method invocations.
• update unnecessary_parenthesis to allow parentheses in more null-aware cascade contexts.
• update unreachable_from_main to track static elements.
• update unnecessary_null_checks to not report on arguments passed to Future.value or Completer.complete.
• mark always_use_package_imports and prefer_relative_imports as incompatible rules.
• update only_throw_errors to not report on Never-typed expressions.
• update unnecessary_lambdas to not report with late final variables.
• update avoid_function_literals_in_foreach_calls to not report with nullable- typed targets.
• add new lint: deprecated_member_use_from_same_package which replaces the soft-deprecated analyzer hint of the same name.
• update public_member_api_docs to not require docs on enum constructors.
• update prefer_void_to_null to not report on as-expressions.

Migration tool removal

The null safety migration tool (dart migrate) has been removed. If you still have code which needs to be migrated to null safety, please run dart migrate using Dart version 2.19, before upgrading to Dart version 3.0.

Pub

• To preserve compatibility with null-safe code pre Dart 3, Pub will interpret a language constraint indicating a language version of 2.12 or higher and an upper bound of <3.0.0 as <4.0.0.

  For example >=2.19.2 <3.0.0 will be interpreted as >=2.19.2 <4.0.0.

• dart pub publish will no longer warn about dependency_overrides. Dependency overrides only take effect in the root package of a resolution.

• dart pub token add now verifies that the given token is valid for including in a header according to RFC 6750 section 2.1. This means they must contain only the characters: ^[a-zA-Z0-9._~+/=-]+$. Before a failure would happen when attempting to send the authorization header.

• dart pub get and related commands will now by default also update the dependencies in the example folder (if it exists). Use --no-example to avoid this.

• On Windows the PUB_CACHE has moved to %LOCALAPPDATA%, since Dart 2.8 the PUB_CACHE has been created in %LOCALAPPDATA% when one wasn't present. Hence, this only affects users with a PUB_CACHE created by Dart 2.7 or earlier. If you have path/to/.pub-cache/bin in PATH you may need to update your PATH.

• [DAP] restartFrameRequest is now supported for frames up until the first async boundary (that are not also the top frame).
• Update vm_service version to >=11.0.0 <13.0.0.

• [DAP] The change to use VM Service Isolate numbers for threadIds has been reverted because Isolate numbers can be larger than the 32-bit integers allowed in DAP.
• [DAP] Threads returned from threadsRequest from the DDS DAP handler now include isolateId fields to allow mapping back to VM Service Isolates.

• Updated devtools_shared to ^2.26.1.

This is a patch release that fixes DDC to handle a breaking change in Chrome (issue #43193).

This is a patch release that fixes transient StackOverflow exceptions when building Flutter applications (issue flutter/flutter#63560).

This is a patch release that fixes unhandled exceptions in some Flutter applications (issue flutter/flutter#63038).

Language

Core libraries

dart:async

• Adds Stream.multi constructor creating streams which can be listened to more than once, and where each individual listener can be controlled independently.

dart:convert

• Breaking change #41100: When encoding a string containing unpaired surrogates as UTF-8, the unpaired surrogates will be encoded as replacement characters (U+FFFD). When decoding UTF-8, encoded surrogates will be treated as malformed input. When decoding UTF-8 with allowMalformed: true, the number of replacement characters emitted for malformed input sequences has been changed to match the WHATWG encoding standard.

dart:io

• #42006: The signature of exit has been changed to return the Nevertype instead of void. since no code will run after it,
• Class OSError now implements Exception. This change means OSError will now be caught in catch clauses catching Exceptions.
• Added InternetAddress.tryParse.
• Abstract Unix Domain Socket is supported on Linux/Android now. Using an InternetAddress with address starting with '@' and type being InternetAddressType.Unix will create an abstract Unix Domain Socket.
• On Windows, file APIs can now handle files and directories identified by long paths (greater than 260 characters). It complies with all restrictions from Long Path on Windows. Note that Directory.current does not work with long path.

dart:html

• Breaking change: CssClassSet.add() previously returned null if the CssClassSet corresponded to multiple elements. In order to align with the null-safe changes in the Set interface, it will now return false instead. The same applies for CssClassSet.toggle.

• EventStreamSubscription.cancel method used to return null, but since StreamSubscription.cancel has changed to be non-nullable, this method returns an empty Future instead. Due to an optimization on null Futures, this method used to complete synchronously, but now that the Future is empty instead, it completes asynchronously, therefore potentially invalidating code that relied on the synchronous side-effect. This change will only affect code using sound null-safety. See issue #41653 for more details.

• Methods in Console have been updated to better reflect the modern Console specification. Particularly of interest are dir and table which take in extra optional arguments.

dart:mirrors

• Breaking change #42714: web compilers (dart2js and DDC) now produce a compile-time error if dart:mirrors is imported.

  Most projects should not be affected. Since 2.0.0 this library was unsupported and produced runtime errors on all its APIs. Since then several tools already reject code that use dart:mirrors including webdev and flutter tools, we expect few projects to run into this problem.

Tools

dartfmt

• Add --fix-single-cascade-statements.
• Correctly handle var in --fix-function-typedefs.
• Preserve leading indentation in fixed doc comments.
• Split outer nested control flow elements.
• Always place a blank line after script tags.
• Don't add unneeded splits on if elements near comments.
• Indent blocks in initializers of multiple-variable declarations.
• Update the null-aware subscript syntax from ?.[] to ?[].

Analyzer

• Static analyses with a severity of "error" can no longer be ignored with comments (// ignore: code and // ignore_for_file: code).

Linter

Updated the Linter to 0.1.117, which includes:

• New lint: do_not_use_environment.
• New lint: exhaustive_cases.
• New lint: no_default_cases (experimental).
• New lint: sized_box_for_whitespace.
• New lint: use_is_even_rather_than_modulo.
• Updated directives_ordering to remove third party package special-casing.
• Updated prefer_is_empty to special-case assert initializers and const contexts.
• Updated prefer_mixin to allow "legacy" SDK abstract class mixins.
• Updated sized_box_for_whitespace to address false-positives.
• Updated type_annotate_public_apis to allow inferred types in final field assignments.
• Updated unnecessary_lambdas to check for tear-off assignability.
• Updated unsafe_html to use a SecurityLintCode (making it un-ignorable) and to include Window.open, Element.html and DocumentFragment.html in unsafe API checks. Also added checks for attributes and methods on extensions.

Dart VM

• Breaking change #41100: When printing a string using the print function, the default implementation (used when not overridden by the embedder or the current zone) will print any unpaired surrogates in the string as replacement characters (U+FFFD). Similarly, the Dart_StringToUTF8 function in the Dart API will convert unpaired surrogates into replacement characters.

Pub

• pub run and pub global run accepts a --enable-experiment flag enabling experiments in the Dart VM (and language).
• Warn when publishing the first null-safe version of a package.
• pub outdated:
  • If the current version of a dependency is a prerelease version, use prereleases for latest if there is no newer stable.
  • Don't require a pubspec.lock file. When the lockfile is missing, the Current column is empty.
• pub upgrade: Show summary count of outdated packages after running. It will also only show newer packages if they are not prereleases or the package is already a prerelease.
• Publishing Flutter plugins using the old plugin format is no longer allowed. Plugins using the old plugin format can still be consumed.
• pub run: Fix precompilation with relative PUB_CACHE paths (#2486).
• Preserve Windows line endings in pubspec.lock if they are already there (#2489).
• Better terminal color-detection. Use colors in terminals on Windows.
• Fix git folder names in cache, allowing for ssh-style git dependencies.
• Fix: Avoid precompilation of dependencies of global packages.

This is a patch release that fixes the following issues:

• crashes in Flutter apps (issue flutter/flutter#57318).
• a regression in stack traces (issue #41907).
• re-canonicalization of constants with unboxed fields (issue flutter/flutter#57190).

This is a patch release that fixes an AOT compilation bug in global transformations which manifests as a NoSuchMethod exception (issue flutter/flutter#56479).

Much of the changes in this release are in preparation for non-nullable types, which will arrive in a future version. In anticipation of that, we have made a number of small but technically breaking changes to several core library APIs in order to make them easier to use in a world with non-nullable types. Almost all existing Dart code will be unaffected by these changes, but if you see unexpected failures, note the breaking changes listed below.

Language

There are no new language features in this release. There are only two minor breaking changes:

• Breaking change #40675: Fixed an implementation bug where local variable inference would incorrectly use the promoted type of a type variable.

• Breaking change #41362: Dart 2.0.0 made the clauses implements Function, extends Function, or with Function have no effect (spec section 19.6). We fixed an implementation bug that may be visible on some rare scenarios.

Core libraries

dart:async

• Breaking change #40676: Changed the return type of StreamSubscription.cancel() to Future<void>. Previously, it was declared to return Future and was allowed to return null at runtime.

• Breaking change #40681: The runZoned() function is split into two functions: runZoned() and runZonedGuarded(), where the latter has a required onError parameter, and the former has none. This prepares the functions for null safety where the two functions will differ in the nullability of their return types.

• Breaking change #40683: Errors passed to Completer.completeError(), Stream.addError(), Future.error(), etc. can no longer be null. These operations now synchronously throw an exception if passed a null error.

• Make stack traces non-null #40130. Where methods like completer.completeError() allow omitting a stack trace, the platform will now insert a default stack trace rather than propagate a null value.

  Error handling functions need no longer be prepared for null stack traces.

dart:core

• Breaking change #40674: Three members on RuneIterator no longer return null when accessed before the first call to moveNext(). Instead, current and rawIndex return -1 and currentAsString returns an empty string.

• Breaking change #40678: The String.fromEnvironment() default value for defaultValue is now an empty string instead of null. Likewise, the default value for int.fromEnvironment()'s defaultValue parameter is zero. Under null safety, a constructor cannot return null, so this prepares these APIs for that.

• The class CastError is deprecated, and all implementation specific classes implementing TypeError or CastError now implement both. In a future release, CastError will be removed. See issue 40763 for details.

• Adds StackTrace.empty constant which is the stack trace used as default stack trace when no better alternative is available.

• The class TypeError no longer extends AssertionError. This also means that it no longer inherits the spurious message getter which was added to AssertionError when the second operand to assert was allowed. The value of that getter on a TypeError was the same string as returned by toString(), so it is still available.

• ArgumentError.checkNotNull() and the RangeError static methods checkValueInInterval(), checkValidIndex() and checkNotNegative() all return their first argument on success. This makes these functions more convenient to use in-line in, for example, => function bodies or constructor initialization lists.

dart:developer

• The constructors for TimelineTask now accept an optional filterKey parameter. If provided, the arguments for all events associated with the task will contain an entry named filterKey, set to the value of the filterKey parameter provided in the constructor. This will be used by tooling to allow for better filtering of timeline events.

dart:ffi

• Breaking change: Changed Pointer.asFunction() and DynamicLibrary.lookupFunction() to extension methods. Invoking them dynamically previously already threw an exception, so the runtime behavior stays the same. However, the extension methods are only visible if dart:ffi is imported directly. This breaks code where dart:ffi is not directly imported. To fix, add:

  import 'dart:ffi';
  

dart:html

• Breaking change #39627: Changed the return type of several HTML native methods involving futures. In return types that matched Future<List<T>>, T was changed to dynamic. These methods would have resulted in a runtime error if they were used.

• Breaking change: Node.insertAllBefore() erroneously had a return type of Node, even though it was not returning anything. This has been corrected to void.

dart:io

• Class HttpParser will no longer throw an exception when a HTTP response status code is within [0, 999]. Customized status codes in this range are now valid.

• Breaking change #33501: The signature of HttpHeaders methods add() and set have been changed to:

  void add(String name, Object value, {bool preserveHeaderCase: false})
  void set(String name, Object value, {bool preserveHeaderCase: false})
  

  Setting preserveHeaderCase to true preserves the case of the name parameter instead of converting it to lowercase. The HttpHeader.forEach() method provides the current case of each header.

  This is breaking only for classes extending or implementing HttpHeaders and having their own add or set methods without the bool preserveHeaderCase named parameter.

• Breaking change #40702: The Socket class now throws a SocketException if the socket has been explicitly destroyed or upgraded to a secure socket upon setting or getting socket options. Previously, setting a socket option would be ignored and getting a socket option would return null.

• Breaking change #40483: The Process class now throws a StateError if the process is detached (ProcessStartMode.detached and ProcessStartMode.detachedWithStdio) upon accessing the exitCode getter. It now also throws when not connected to the child process's stdio (ProcessStartMode.detached and ProcessStartMode.inheritStdio) upon accessing the stdin, stdout, and stderr getters. Previously, these getters would all return null.

• Breaking change #40706: The dummy object returned if FileStat.stat() or FileStat.statSync() fail now contains Unix epoch timestamps instead of null for the accessed, changed, and modified getters.

• Breaking change #40709: The HeaderValue class now parses more strictly in two invalid edge cases. This is the class used to parse the semicolon delimited parameters used in the Accept, Authorization, Content-Type, and other such HTTP headers.

  The empty parameter value without double quotes (which is not allowed by the standards) is now parsed as the empty string rather than null. E.g. HeaderValue.parse("v;a=").parameters now gives {"a": ""} rather than {"a": null}.

  Invalid inputs with unbalanced double quotes are now rejected. E.g. HeaderValue.parse('v;a="b').parameters will now throw a HttpException instead of giving {"a": "b"}.

• The HeaderValue.toString() method now supports parameters with null values by omitting the value. HeaderValue("v", {"a": null, "b": "c"}).toString() now gives v; a; b=c. This behavior can be used to implement some features in the Accept and Sec-WebSocket-Extensions headers.

  Likewise the empty value and values using characters outside of RFC 7230 tokens are now correctly implemented by double quoting such values with escape sequences. For example:

  HeaderValue("v",
      {"a": "A", "b": "(B)", "c": "", "d": "ø", "e": "\\\""}).toString()
  

  Gives: v;a=A;b="(B)";c="";d="ø";e="\\\"".

• Unix domain sockets are now supported on Linux, Android and MacOS, which can be used by passing a InternetAddress of InternetAddressType.Unix into the connect(), startConnect() and bind() methods. The port argument in those methods will be ignored. The port getter always returns 0 for Unix domain sockets.

• Class InternetAddressType gains one more option Unix, which represents a Unix domain address.

• Class InternetAddress:

  • InternetAddress constructor gains an optional type parameter. To create a Unix domain address, type is set to InternetAddressType.Unix and address is a file path.

  • InternetAddress gains a new constructor fromRawAddress() that takes an address in byte format for Internet addresses or raw file path for Unix domain addresses.

• Breaking change #40681: The static methods runZoned() and runWithHttpOverrides() on HttpOverrides no longer accept zoneSpecification and onError parameters. Use the runZoned() or runZonedGuarded() functions from dart:async directly if needing to specify those.

• Class HttpClient and HttpServer, when receiving HttpRequest or HttpClientResponse, will now put a 8K size limit on its header fields and values.

dart:mirrors

• Added MirrorSystem.neverType.

Dart VM

• Added Dart_TypeDynamic, Dart_TypeVoid and Dart_TypeNever. Type dynamic can no longer by reached using Dart_GetType(dart:core, dynamic).

• Added the following methods to the VM embedding API:

  • Dart_GetNonNullableType()
  • Dart_GetNullableType()
  • Dart_TypeToNonNullable()
  • Dart_TypeToNullable()
  • Dart_IsLegacyType()
  • Dart_IsNonNullableType()
  • Dart_IsNullableType()

Tools

Dart Dev Compiler (DDC)

We fixed several inconsistencies between DDC and Dart2JS so that users less frequently encounter code that is accepted by one compiler but then fails in the other.

• Breaking change: Deleted the legacy (analyzer based) version of DDC. For additional details see the announcement.

  • The --kernel option is now ignored and defaults to true. There is no longer any way to invoke the legacy (analyzer based) version of DDC.

  • Command line arguments that were only used for the legacy DDC have been removed.

  • The pre-compiled dart_sdk.js artifacts generated by legacy DDC have been deleted from dart-sdk/lib/dev_compiler in favor of the versions located at dart-sdk/lib/dev_compiler/kernel.

• Breaking change: Functions passed to JavaScript using the recommended package:js interop specification must now be wrapped with a call to allowInterop. This behavior was always enforced by Dart2JS, but was not enforced consistently by DDC. It is now enforced by both.

• Breaking change: Constructors in @JS() classes must be marked with external. Previously the external could be omitted in some cases with DDC but doing so would cause incorrect behavior with Dart2JS.

• JS interop classes with an index operator are now static errors.

• All remaining support from the dart:mirrors library has been removed. Use of this library on the web has been unsupported and prevented by the Dart build systems since Dart v2.0.0. All known exception cases have been cleaned up. This change makes DDC and Dart2JS now behave consistently.

  The library can still be imported on web apps, but all APIs throw. In a future breaking change release, imports to this library will likely become a compile-time error.

Dart2JS

A new representation of runtime types is enabled by default.

This change is part of a long term goal of making runtime checks cheaper and more flexible for upcoming changes in the language. The new representation disentangles how types and classes are represented and makes types first-class to the compiler. This makes it possible to do certain kind of optimizations on type checks that were not possible before and will enable us to model non-nullable types in the near future.

This change should not affect the semantics of your application, but it has some relatively small visible effects that we want to highlight:

• Types are now canonicalized, this fixes a long standing bug that Types could not be used in switch cases (issue 17207).

• Code-size changes may be visible, but the difference is small overall. It is more visible on smaller apps because the new implementation includes more helper methods. On large apps we have even seen an overall code-size reduction.

• Certain checks are a lot faster. This is less noticeable if you are compiling apps with -O3 where checks are omitted altogether. Even with -O3, the performance of some is checks used by your app may improve.

• When using -O3 and -O4 incorrect type annotations could surface as errors. The old type representation was accidentally lenient on some invalid type annotations. We have only encountered this issue on programs that were not tested properly at the js-interop program boundary.

• Type.toString() has a small change that is rarely visible. For a long time, Dart2JS has had support to erase unused type variables. Today, when Dart2JS is given --lax-runtime-type-to-string (currently included in -O2, -O3, and -O4) and it decides to erase the type variable of a class Foo<T>, then it compiles expressions like foo.runtimeType.toString() to print Foo. With the new representation, this will show Foo<erased> instead. This change may be visible in error messages produced by type checks involving erased types.

Because types and classes are represented separately, we will likely reevaluate restrictions of deferred libraries in the near future. For example, we could support referring to deferred types because types can be downloaded while classes are not.

In the unlikely case you run into any issues, please file a bug so we can investigate. You can temporarily force the old type representation by passing --use-old-rti to Dart2JS if necessary, but our goal is to delete the old type representation soon.

In addition, we fixed some inconsistencies between Dart2JS and DDC:

• JS interop classes with an index operator are now static errors instead of causing invalid code in Dart2JS.

• Breaking change: The subtyping rule for generic functions is now more forgiving. Corresponding type parameter bounds now only need to be mutual subtypes rather than structurally equal up to renaming of bound type variables and equating all top types.

• Breaking change: Types are now normalized. See normalization for the full specification. Types will now be printed in their normal form, and mutual subtypes with the same normal form will now be considered equal.

• Breaking change: Constructors in @JS() classes must be marked with external. Previously, the external could be omitted for unused constructors. Omitting external for a constructor which is used would cause incorrect behavior at runtime, now omitting it on any constructor is a static error.

Other dart2js changes:

• Breaking change: The --package-root flag, which was hidden and disabled in Dart 2.0.0, has been completely removed. Passing this flag will now cause dart2js to fail.

Linter

Updated the Linter to 0.1.114, which includes:

• Fixed avoid_shadowing_type_parameters to support extensions and mixins.
• Updated non_constant_identifier_names to allow named constructors made up of only underscores (_).
• Updated avoid_unused_constructor_parameters to ignore unused params named in all underscores (_).

Analyzer

• Removed support for the deprecated analysis options file name .analysis_options.

Pub

• Added pub outdated command which lists outdated package dependencies, and gives advice on how to upgrade.

• pub get and pub upgrade now fetch version information about hosted dependencies in parallel, improving the time package resolution performance.

• pub get and pub upgrade no longer precompile executables from dependencies by default. Instead they are precompiled on first pub run. Use pub get --precompile to get the previous behavior.

• Fixed missing retries of DNS failures during pub get.

• If code contains imports for packages not listed in the package's pubspec.yaml then pub publish will reject the package.

• pub publish no longer requires the presence of a homepage field, if the repository field is provided.

• pub publish warns if non-pre-release packages depends on pre-release packages or pre-release Dart SDKs.

• Relative paths in pubspec.lock now use / also on Windows to make the file sharable between machines.

• Fixed language version in .dart_tool/package_config.json for packages without an explicit SDK constraint. Pub now writes an empty language version where before the language version of the current SDK would be used.

• %LOCALAPPDATA% is now preferred over %APPDATA% when creating a pub cache directory on Windows. %LOCALAPPDATA% is not copied when users roam between devices.

• pub publish warns if LICENSE and README.md files are not called those exact names.

• pub repair cache downloads hosted packages in parallel.

• [DAP] Isolates that exit immediately after being paused (perhaps by another debugger or due to the app shutting down) will no longer cause a crash.

• [DAP] Configuring and resuming isolates will no longer cause a crash if the isolate exits before the request is processed.

• [DAP] Sentinel values (such as uninitialized fields/locals) will no longer cause scopesRequest/variablesRequest to fail, instead showing appropriate text (like "<not initialized>") against the variable.

• [DAP] Debug adapters now only call setLibraryDebuggable when the debuggable flag changes from the default/current values, reducing the amount of VM Service traffic for new isolates/reloads.
• [DAP] breakpoint events are no longer sometimes sent prior to the response to the setBreakpointsRequest that created them.

• [DAP] scopesRequest now returns a Globals scope containing global variables for the current frame.
• [DAP] Responses to setBreakpointsRequest will now have verified: false and will send breakpoint events to update verified and/or line/column as the VM resolves them.

• Updated vm_service version to >=9.0.0 <12.0.0.

• [DAP] Added support for ,d (decimal), ,h (hex) and ,nq (no quotes) format specifiers to be used as suffixes to evaluation requests.
• [DAP] Added support for format.hex in variablesRequest and evaluateRequest.

• [DAP] Added support for displaying records in responses to variablesRequest.
• A new exception ExistingDartDevelopmentServiceException (extending DartDevelopmentServiceException) is thrown when trying to connect DDS to a VM Service that already has a DDS instance. This new exception contains a ddsUri field that is populated with the URI of the existing DDS instance if provided by the target VM Service.

Security advisory: This is a patch release that addresses a vulnerability in dart:html NodeValidator related to DOM clobbering of previousSibling. See the security advisory CVE-2020-8923 for more details. Thanks to Vincenzo di Cicco for finding and reporting this issue.

This release also improves compatibility with ARMv8 processors (issue 40001) and dart:io stability (issue 40589).

This is a patch release that improves dart2js compile-time (issue 40217).

Breaking change: The Dart SDK for macOS is now only available for x64 (issue 39810).

Extension methods -- which we shipped in preview in 2.6.0 -- are no longer in preview, and are now officially supported as of 2.7.0. Learn more about them here:

https://medium.com/dartlang/extension-methods-2d466cd8b308

Language

• Breaking change: Static extension members are accessible when imported with a prefix (issue 671). In the extension method preview launch, importing a library with a prefix hid all extension members in addition to hiding the extension name, thereby making them inaccessible in the importing library except via the explicit override syntax. Based on user feedback, we have changed this to make extensions methods accessible even when imported with a prefix.

  ```dart
    // "thing.dart"
    class Thing {
    }
    extension Show on Thing {
      void show() {
        print("This is a thing");
      }
   }
   // "client.dart"
   import "thing.dart" as p;
   void test() {
     p.Thing().show(); // Previously an error, now resolves to Show.show
   }
  ```
  

Core libraries

dart:io

• Breaking change: Added IOOverrides.serverSocketBind to aid in writing tests that wish to mock ServerSocket.bind.

dart:typed_data

• Added new constructors, .sublistView(TypedData, [start, end]) to all TypedData classes. The constructor makes it easier, and less error-prone, to create a view of (a slice of) another TypedData object.

Dart VM

• New fields added to existing instances by a reload will now be initialized lazily, as if the field was a late field. This makes the initialization order program-defined, whereas previously it was undefined.

Tools

Linter

The Linter was updated to 0.1.104, which includes:

• updated unnecessary_overrides to allow overrides when annotations (besides @override are specified)
• updated file_names to allow names w/ leading _'s (and improved performance)
• new lint: unnecessary_final

Pub

• pub get generates .dart_tool/package_config.json in addition to .packages to support language versioning.

• pub publish now warns about the old flutter plugin registration format.

• pub publish now warns about the author field in pubspec.yaml being. obsolete.

• Show a proper error message when git is not installed.

Language

• [IN PREVIEW] Static extension members: A new language feature allowing specially declared static functions to be invoked like instance members on expressions of appropriate static types is available in preview.

  Static extension members are declared using a new extension declaration. Example:

  extension MyFancyList<T> on List<T> {
    /// Whether this list has an even length.
    bool get isLengthEven => this.length.isEven;
  
    /// Whether this list has an odd length.
    bool get isLengthOdd => !isLengthEven;
  
    /// List of values computed for each pairs of adjacent elements.
    ///
    /// The result always has one element less than this list,
    /// if this list has any elements.
    List<R> combinePairs<R>(R Function(T, T) combine) =>
        [for (int i = 1; i < this.length; i++)
            combine(this[i - 1], this[i])];
  }
  

  Extension declarations cannot declare instance fields or constructors. Extension members can be invoked explicitly, MyFancyList(intList).isLengthEven), or implicitly, intList.isLengthEven, where the latter is recognized by intList matching the List<T> "on" type of the declaration. An extension member cannot be called implicitly on an expression whose static type has a member with the same base-name. In that case, the interface member takes precedence. If multiple extension members apply to the same implicit invocation, the most specific one is used, if there is one such.

  Extensions can be declared on any type, not just interface types.

  extension IntCounter on int {
    /// The numbers from this number to, but not including, [end].
    Iterable<int> to(int end) sync* {
      int step = end < this ? -1 : 1;
      for (int i = this; i != end; i += step) yield i;
    }
  }
  
  extension CurryFunction<R, S, T> on R Function(S, T) {
    /// Curry a binary function with its first argument.
    R Function(T) curry(S first) => (T second) => this(first, second);
  }
  

• Breaking change #37985: Inference is changed when using Null values in a FutureOr context. Namely, constraints of the forms similar to Null <: FutureOr<T> now yield Null as the solution for T. For example, the following code will now print "Null", and it was printing "dynamic" before (note that the anonymous closure () {} in the example has Null as its return type):

  import 'dart:async';
  
  void foo<T>(FutureOr<T> Function() f) { print(T); }
  
  main() { foo(() {}); }
  

Core libraries

• Default values of parameters of abstract methods are no longer available via dart:mirrors.

dart:developer

• Added optional parent parameter to TimelineTask constructor to allow for linking of asynchronous timeline events in the DevTools timeline view.

dart:ffi

• Breaking change: The API now makes use of static extension members. Static extension members enable the dart:ffi API to be more precise with types, and provide convenient access to memory through extension getters and setters. The extension members on Pointer provide .value and .value = for accessing the value in native memory and [] and []= for indexed access. The method asExternalTypedData has been replaced with asTypedList extension methods. And finally, Structs do no longer have a type argument and are accessed using the extension member .ref on Pointer. These changes makes the code using dart:ffi much more concise.
• Breaking change: The memory management has been removed (Pointer.allocate and Pointer.free). Instead, memory management is available in package:ffi.
• Breaking change: Pointer.offsetBy was removed, use cast and elementAt instead.
• Faster memory load and stores.
• The dartanalyzer (commandline and IDEs) now reports dart:ffi static errors.
• Callbacks are now supported in AOT (ahead-of-time) compiled code.

dart:io

• Added enableTimelineLogging property to HttpClient which, when enabled, will post HTTP connection and request information to the developer timeline for all HttpClient instances.

Dart VM

• Added a new tool for AOT compiling Dart programs to native, self-contained executables. See https://dart.dev/tools/dart2native for additional details.

Dart for the Web

Dart Dev Compiler (DDC)

• Kernel DDC will no longer accept non-dill files as summary inputs.
• Removed support for the deprecated web extension.

Tools

Linter

The Linter was updated to 0.1.101, which includes:

• fixed diagnostic_describe_all_properties to flag properties in Diagnosticables with no debug methods defined
• fixed noSuchMethod exception in camel_case_extensions when analyzing unnamed extensions
• fixed avoid_print to catch tear-off usage
• new lint: avoid_web_libraries_in_flutter (experimental)
• (internal) prepare unnecessary_lambdas for coming MethodInvocation vs. FunctionExpressionInvocation changes

Language

The set of operations allowed in constant expressions has been expanded as described in the constant update proposal. The control flow and spread collection features shipped in Dart 2.3 are now also supported in constants as described in the specification here.

Specifically, it is now valid to use the following operations in constant expressions under the appropriate conditions:

• Casts (e as T) and type tests (e is T).
• Comparisons to null, even for types which override the == operator.
• The &, |, and ^ binary operators on booleans.
• The spread operators (... and ...?).
• An if element in a collection literal.

// Example: these are now valid constants.
const Object i = 3;
const list = [i as int];
const set = {if (list is List<int>) ...list};
const map = {if (i is int) i : "int"};

In addition, the semantics of constant evaluation has been changed as follows:

• The && operator only evaluates its second operand if the first evaluates to true.
• The || operator only evaluates its second operand if the first evaluates to false.
• The ?? operator only evaluates its second operand if the first evaluates to null.
• The conditional operator (e ? e1 : e2) only evaluates one of the two branches, depending on the value of the first operand.

// Example: x is now a valid constant definition.
const String s = null;
const int x = (s == null) ? 0 : s.length;

Core libraries

• Breaking change #36900: The following methods and properties across various core libraries, which used to declare a return type of List<int>, were updated to declare a return type of Uint8List:

  • BytesBuilder.takeBytes()
  • BytesBuilder.toBytes()
  • Datagram.data
  • File.readAsBytes() (Future<Uint8List>)
  • File.readAsBytesSync()
  • InternetAddress.rawAddress
  • RandomAccessFile.read() (Future<Uint8List>)
  • RandomAccessFile.readSync()
  • RawSocket.read()
  • Utf8Codec.encode() (and Utf8Encoder.convert())

  In addition, the following classes were updated to implement Stream<Uint8List> rather than Stream<List<int>>:

  • HttpRequest
  • Socket

  Possible errors and how to fix them

  • The argument type 'Utf8Decoder' can't be assigned to the parameter type 'StreamTransformer<Uint8List, dynamic>'

    type 'Utf8Decoder' is not a subtype of type 'StreamTransformer' of 'streamTransformer'"

    You can fix these call sites by updating your code to use StreamTransformer.bind() instead of Stream.transform(), like so:

    Before: stream.transform(utf8.decoder) After: utf8.decoder.bind(stream)

  • The argument type 'IOSink' can't be assigned to the parameter type 'StreamConsumer<Uint8List>'

    type '_IOSinkImpl' is not a subtype of type 'StreamConsumer<Uint8List>' of 'streamConsumer'

    You can fix these call sites by casting your stream instance to a Stream<List<int>> before calling .pipe() on the stream, like so:

    Before: stream.pipe(consumer) After: stream.cast<List<int>>().pipe(consumer)

  Finally, the following typed lists were updated to have their sublist() methods declare a return type that is the same as the source list:

  • Int8List.sublist() → Int8List
  • Int16List.sublist() → Int16List
  • Int32List.sublist() → Int32List
  • Int64List.sublist() → Int64List
  • Int32x4List.sublist() → Int32x4List
  • Float32List.sublist() → Float32List
  • Float64List.sublist() → Float64List
  • Float32x4List.sublist() → Float32x4List
  • Float64x2List.sublist() → Float64x2List
  • Uint8List.sublist() → Uint8List
  • Uint8ClampedList.sublist() → Uint8ClampedList
  • Uint16List.sublist() → Uint16List
  • Uint32List.sublist() → Uint32List
  • Uint64List.sublist() → Uint64List

dart:async

• Add value and error constructors on Stream to allow easily creating single-value or single-error streams.

dart:core

• Update Uri class to support RFC6874: "%25" or "%" can be appended to the end of a valid IPv6 representing a Zone Identifier. A valid zone ID consists of unreversed character or Percent encoded octet, which was defined in RFC3986. IPv6addrz = IPv6address "%25" ZoneID

dart:io

• Breaking change #37192: The Cookie class's constructor's name and value optional positional parameters are now mandatory. The signature changes from:

  Cookie([String name, String value])
  

  to

  Cookie(String name, String value)
  

  However, it has not been possible to set name and value to null since Dart 1.3.0 (2014) where a bug made it impossible. Any code not using both parameters or setting any to null would necessarily get a noSuchMethod exception at runtime. This change catches such erroneous uses at compile time. Since code could not previously correctly omit the parameters, this is not really a breaking change.

• Breaking change #37192: The Cookie class's name and value setters now validates that the strings are made from the allowed character set and are not null. The constructor already made these checks and this fixes the loophole where the setters didn't also validate.

Dart VM

Tools

Pub

• Clean-up invalid git repositories in cache when fetching from git.
• Breaking change #36765: Packages published to pub.dev can no longer contain git dependencies. These packages will be rejected by the server.

Linter

The Linter was updated to 0.1.96, which includes:

• fixed false positives in unnecessary_parens
• various changes to migrate to preferred analyzer APIs
• rule test fixes

Dartdoc

Dartdoc was updated to 0.28.4; this version includes several fixes and is based on a newer version of the analyzer package.

Core libraries

dart:isolate

• TransferableTypedData class was added to facilitate faster cross-isolate communication of Uint8List data.

• Breaking change: Isolate.resolvePackageUri will always throw an UnsupportedError when compiled with dart2js or DDC. This was the only remaining API in dart:isolate that didn't automatically throw since we dropped support for this library in Dart 2.0.0. Note that the API already throws in dart2js if the API is used directly without manually setting up a defaultPackagesBase hook.

dart:developer

• Exposed result, errorCode and errorDetail getters in ServiceExtensionResponse to allow for better debugging of VM service extension RPC results.

dart:io

• Fixed Cookie class interoperability with certain websites by allowing the cookie values to be the empty string (Issue 35804) and not stripping double quotes from the value (Issue 33327) in accordance with RFC 6265.

• #36971: The HttpClientResponse interface has been extended with the addition of a new compressionState getter, which specifies whether the body of a response was compressed when it was received and whether it has been automatically uncompressed via HttpClient.autoUncompress.

  As part of this change, a corresponding new enum was added to dart:io: HttpClientResponseCompressionState.

  This is a breaking change for those implementing the HttpClientResponse interface as subclasses will need to implement the new getter.

dart:async

• Breaking change #36382: The await for allowed null as a stream due to a bug in StreamIterator class. This bug has now been fixed.

dart:core

• #36171: The RegExp interface has been extended with two new constructor named parameters:

  • unicode: (bool, default: false), for Unicode patterns
  • dotAll: (bool, default: false), to change the matching behavior of '.' to also match line terminating characters.

  Appropriate properties for these named parameters have also been added so their use can be detected after construction.

  In addition, RegExp methods that originally returned Match objects now return a more specific subtype, RegExpMatch, which adds two features:

  • Iterable<String> groupNames, a property that contains the names of all named capture groups
  • String namedGroup(String name), a method that retrieves the match for the given named capture group

  This is a breaking change for implementers of the RegExp interface. Subclasses will need to add the new properties and may have to update the return types on overridden methods.

Language

• Breaking change #35097: Covariance of type variables used in super-interfaces is now enforced. For example, the following code was previously accepted and will now be rejected:

class A<X> {};
class B<X> extends A<void Function(X)> {};

• The identifier async can now be used in asynchronous and generator functions.

Dart for the Web

Dart Dev Compiler (DDC)

• Improve NoSuchMethod errors for failing dynamic calls. Now they include specific information about the nature of the error such as:
  • Attempting to call a null value.
  • Calling an object instance with a null call() method.
  • Passing too few or too many arguments.
  • Passing incorrect named arguments.
  • Passing too few or too many type arguments.
  • Passing type arguments to a non-generic method.

Tools

Linter

The Linter was updated to 0.1.91, which includes the following changes:

• Fixed missed cases in prefer_const_constructors
• Fixed prefer_initializing_formals to no longer suggest API breaking changes
• Updated omit_local_variable_types to allow explicit dynamics
• Fixed null-reference in unrelated_type_equality_checks
• New lint: unsafe_html
• Broadened prefer_null_aware_operators to work beyond local variables.
• Added prefer_if_null_operators.
• Fixed prefer_contains false positives.
• Fixed unnecessary_parenthesis false positives.
• Fixed prefer_asserts_in_initializer_lists false positives
• Fixed curly_braces_in_flow_control_structures to handle more cases
• New lint: prefer_double_quotes
• New lint: sort_child_properties_last
• Fixed type_annotate_public_apis false positive for static const initializers

Pub

• pub publish will no longer warn about missing dependencies for import statements in example/.
• OAuth2 authentication will explicitly ask for the openid scope.

This is a patch version release with bug fixes.

Tools

dart2js

• Fixed a bug that caused the compiler to crash when it compiled UI-as-code features within fields (Issue 36864).

The focus in this release is on the new "UI-as-code" language features which make collections more expressive and declarative.

Language

Flutter is growing rapidly, which means many Dart users are building UI in code out of big deeply-nested expressions. Our goal with 2.3.0 was to make that kind of code easier to write and maintain. Collection literals are a large component, so we focused on three features to make collections more powerful. We'll use list literals in the examples below, but these features also work in map and set literals.

Spread

Placing ... before an expression inside a collection literal unpacks the result of the expression and inserts its elements directly inside the new collection. Where before you had to write something like this:

CupertinoPageScaffold(
  child: ListView(children: [
    Tab2Header()
  ]..addAll(buildTab2Conversation())
    ..add(buildFooter())),
);

Now you can write this:

CupertinoPageScaffold(
  child: ListView(children: [
    Tab2Header(),
    ...buildTab2Conversation(),
    buildFooter()
  ]),
);

If you know the expression might evaluate to null and you want to treat that as equivalent to zero elements, you can use the null-aware spread ...?.

Collection if

Sometimes you might want to include one or more elements in a collection only under certain conditions. If you're lucky, you can use a ?: operator to selectively swap out a single element, but if you want to exchange more than one or omit elements, you are forced to write imperative code like this:

Widget build(BuildContext context) {
  var children = [
    IconButton(icon: Icon(Icons.menu)),
    Expanded(child: title)
  ];

  if (isAndroid) {
    children.add(IconButton(icon: Icon(Icons.search)));
  }

  return Row(children: children);
}

We now allow if inside collection literals to conditionally omit or (with else) swap out an element:

Widget build(BuildContext context) {
  return Row(
    children: [
      IconButton(icon: Icon(Icons.menu)),
      Expanded(child: title),
      if (isAndroid)
        IconButton(icon: Icon(Icons.search)),
    ],
  );
}

Unlike the existing ?: operator, a collection if can be composed with spreads to conditionally include or omit multiple items:

Widget build(BuildContext context) {
  return Row(
    children: [
      IconButton(icon: Icon(Icons.menu)),
      if (isAndroid) ...[
        Expanded(child: title),
        IconButton(icon: Icon(Icons.search)),
      ]
    ],
  );
}

Collection for

In many cases, the higher-order methods on Iterable give you a declarative way to modify a collection in the context of a single expression. But some operations, especially involving both transforming and filtering, can be cumbersome to express in a functional style.

To solve this problem, you can use for inside a collection literal. Each iteration of the loop produces an element which is then inserted in the resulting collection. Consider the following code:

var command = [
  engineDartPath,
  frontendServer,
  ...fileSystemRoots.map((root) => "--filesystem-root=$root"),
  ...entryPoints
      .where((entryPoint) => fileExists("lib/$entryPoint.json"))
      .map((entryPoint) => "lib/$entryPoint"),
  mainPath
];

With a collection for, the code becomes simpler:

var command = [
  engineDartPath,
  frontendServer,
  for (var root in fileSystemRoots) "--filesystem-root=$root",
  for (var entryPoint in entryPoints)
    if (fileExists("lib/$entryPoint.json")) "lib/$entryPoint",
  mainPath
];

As you can see, all three of these features can be freely composed. For full details of the changes, see the official proposal.

Note: These features are not currently supported in const collection literals. In a future release, we intend to relax this restriction and allow spread and collection if inside const collections.

Core library changes

dart:isolate

• Added debugName property to Isolate.
• Added debugName optional parameter to Isolate.spawn and Isolate.spawnUri.

dart:core

• RegExp patterns can now use lookbehind assertions.
• RegExp patterns can now use named capture groups and named backreferences. Currently, named group matches can only be retrieved in Dart either by the implicit index of the named group or by downcasting the returned Match object to the type RegExpMatch. The RegExpMatch interface contains methods for retrieving the available group names and retrieving a match by group name.

Dart VM

• The VM service now requires an authentication code by default. This behavior can be disabled by providing the --disable-service-auth-codes flag.

• Support for deprecated flags '-c' and '--checked' has been removed.

Dart for the Web

dart2js

A binary format was added to dump-info. The old JSON format is still available and provided by default, but we are starting to deprecate it. The new binary format is more compact and cheaper to generate. On some large apps we tested, it was 4x faster to serialize and used 6x less memory.

To use the binary format today, use --dump-info=binary, instead of --dump-info.

What to expect next?

• The visualizer tool will not be updated to support the new binary format, but you can find several command-line tools at package:dart2js_info that provide similar features to those in the visualizer.

• The command-line tools in package:dart2js_info also work with the old JSON format, so you can start using them even before you enable the new format.

• In a future release --dump-info will default to --dump-info=binary. At that point, there will be an option to fallback to the JSON format, but the visualizer tool will be deprecated.

• A release after that, the JSON format will no longer be available from dart2js, but may be available from a command-line tool in package:dart2js_info.

Tools

dartfmt

• Tweak set literal formatting to follow other collection literals.
• Add support for "UI as code" features.
• Properly format trailing commas in assertions.
• Improve indentation of adjacent strings in argument lists.

Linter

The Linter was updated to 0.1.86, which includes the following changes:

• Added the following lints: prefer_inlined_adds, prefer_for_elements_to_map_fromIterable, prefer_if_elements_to_conditional_expressions, diagnostic_describe_all_properties.
• Updated file_names to skip prefixed-extension Dart files (.css.dart, .g.dart, etc.).
• Fixed false positives in unnecessary_parenthesis.

Pub

• Added a CHANGELOG validator that complains if you pub publish without mentioning the current version.
• Removed validation of library names when doing pub publish.
• Added support for pub global activateing package from a custom pub URL.
• Added subcommand: pub logout. Logs you out of the current session.

Dart native

Initial support for compiling Dart apps to native machine code has been added. Two new tools have been added to the bin folder of the Dart SDK:

• dart2aot: AOT (ahead-of-time) compiles a Dart program to native machine code. The tool is supported on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

• dartaotruntime: A small runtime used for executing an AOT compiled program.