Instead of new FEATURES, focus on 8K+ issues and minor issues on GITHUB, and reply to each GITHub Issue

[fisforfaheem]

Dart needs so many fixes that, instead of adding new features, I think you should focus on the 5K+ bugs and minor issues posted on GitHub and reply to each GitHub issue.

[dart-github-bot]

Summary: User requests that the Dart team prioritize fixing existing 5,000+ GitHub bugs and issues before developing new features, and to improve issue response times.

[FMorschel]

I've been fixing things myself and I'm not in any way related to the Dart team (see here https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/commits?author=FMorschel - there are also new things I made like Go to Imports). You can always help.

The SDK is mostly written in Dart so you only need to understand the project to start and the team is really helpful. I disagree and I'd prefer they make new things for us and we can help them make everything work the best way we can.

There is only so much you can do with limited time (and a single team) and bugs will always show up.

[julemand101]

@fisforfaheem This issue tracker are used for multiple components related to Dart and also includes features and subtasks for those features. It is not really fair to say that all 5k issues are actual issues in Dart SDK itself.

Also lot of GitHub issues are suggestions and discussions topics. Some of this are planned as potential upcoming features and therefore the issues are not closed.

Do you have any specific examples of issues that should be prioritized in your opinion? Also, as @FMorschel also mention, you are welcome to take part in fixing issues (start with more simple ones).

[fisforfaheem]

I believe the dart analyzer can be improved, also dart Analysis server has become slower and very unreliable.

I think team should focus on making dart lint's, analyzer and other related hints and hover info better and super low latency instead of new language features for some months.

[julemand101]

@fisforfaheem There are some issues related to that and there have been made several improvements rather recent. Have you tried latest dev build and checked if you can still reproduce the issues related to slow Analysis server? Also, be aware of this issue related to Windows Defender if you experience slow first analysis after boot: #56755

[FMorschel]

If you want any help with how to start to contribute, feel free to contact me privately or tag me in an issue or on Discord or whatever (same nickname). What I did: posted some issues, and when I got them closed, I looked at the implementations and started doing the same kinds of changes for other people's issues I found similar to mine. Now I understand the broad context around the changes I made and can implement other fixes.

[fisforfaheem]

Actually I am a front end developer and use flutter sdk, not dart directly

Also can the team add those recent fixes and latency fixes to latest flutter sdk release

[FMorschel]

@fisforfaheem, you can use the beta/main (master on Flutter) channels for new changes faster. But you also can look for improvements you really need and ask them to CP (cherry pick) those commits for the stable version (thats why you get the last number with the versioning e.g. 3.6.1 <- bug fix)

[mraleph]

Thanks for your input.

In the future I'd encourage you to submit actionable issues or use other mechanism to indicate that you care about specific issues e.g. leaving comments with additional information on already open issues or using thumbs-up button where appropriate.

Filing "work harder! make it better!" type of issues is not going to help anything. On the other hand, filing actionable issues, helping the team to reproduce existing issues (where team is missing reproductions) and submitting PRs - that is going to help.