John McCutchan caught my attention early on and my hat goes off to him. He brought a unique perspective to advancing performance. I went from Dart to TypeScript to pure JavaScript for a variety of reasons, and I must say productivity in Dart is higher, sometimes much higher. However the Dart2js output and interface makes it less attractive despite higher productivity. I took from the announcement that Google will focus on fixing that, which is encouraging. It's really the only way forward for Dart, since no one else, and now Chrome, is going to include the VM.