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What Dart 3 Changed: Null Safety, New Language Features and Wasm

Dart 3 made sound null safety universal, introduced records, patterns and class modifiers, and began a Dart-to-WebAssembly preview for Flutter web.

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Dart 3 made sound null safety mandatory, added records, patterns and class modifiers, and introduced an early preview of compiling Dart to WebAssembly. The Dart team called it “the largest Dart release to date”; that is the team’s framing, not an independently measured comparison. The release was announced on May 10, 2023.

Why Dart 3 was a major release

Dart was created at Google and became closely associated with Flutter, Google’s toolkit for building cross-platform apps. Dart has multiple compilation targets, though its adoption has not matched Flutter’s. In the May 25, 2023 issue of Bytes, “The biggest Dart yet” refers to the Dart team’s own description of Dart 3 as its largest release to date—not to a measured comparison of code size or feature count. Bytes #190 and the official Dart announcement provide the context.

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What changed for existing Dart projects?

Sound null safety became universal

In Dart 3, all code uses sound null safety. A non-nullable type can be trusted not to contain null. That lets the type system catch some null-related mistakes and gives implementations opportunities for optimization, but it does not prevent every kind of programming error.

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The change also affects migration: Dart 3 removed support for running without sound null safety. The Dart team expected most apps and packages that had already migrated to work, while advising developers who hit problems to consult the migration guide. The release announcement reported that 99% of the top 1,000 packages on pub.dev supported null safety as of May 10, 2023. That is a historical figure from the announcement, not a current compatibility statistic. See the Dart 3 announcement for the release context and the null-safety migration guide for migration guidance.

Which language features did Dart 3 add?

Dart 3 introduced three feature groups that address different needs: records group values, patterns inspect and unpack them, and class modifiers give API authors more control over how classes are used.

Records: group typed values

A record lets code carry several typed values together without requiring a dedicated class for every small grouping. This can make a function’s return value or a local data bundle more concise.

Patterns: inspect and destructure values

Patterns let code match and destructure structured values, including records. They address the question of what a value contains and whether it fits a particular shape.

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Class modifiers: set rules for class use

Class modifiers let library and API authors constrain how classes may be extended, implemented or otherwise used. They provide design control rather than a shorthand for grouping or unpacking data. The Dart 3 announcement describes these language additions.

What did Dart-to-WebAssembly mean at launch?

Dart 3 included an initial preview of Dart-to-WebAssembly compilation, focused first on Flutter web. The Dart team described potential goals around loading, performance consistency and semantic consistency across platforms, while emphasizing that the effort was early and incomplete. These were aims, not demonstrated results: the release announcement did not provide benchmarks showing that the preview had already delivered those gains. The WebAssembly preview therefore represented a forward-looking platform effort, not a mature replacement for established compilation targets. Details and qualifications appear in the official announcement.

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How to understand the release’s significance

Dart 3’s changes are best understood along separate axes: migration impact (mandatory sound null safety), language expressiveness (records and patterns), API design control (class modifiers), and platform maturity (an early WebAssembly preview). This is a way to distinguish the release’s effects, not a benchmark against another language or Dart version.

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