Today, we’d like to announce the release of DartBox2D, a port of the wildly successful Box2D physics engine to Dart, Google’s new language for the web.

Box2D has been ported to other languages, including JavaScript, but this release opens the door to Dart becoming a language for games on the web, which, as we all know, is what the web is really for (that and pictures of cats, of course). The work was started by two interns at Google, Greg Bigelow and Ahmed Hussein, continued by Joel Webber, and finished up by Dominic Hamon.

DartBox2D is a straight port from the Java version and isn’t yet using all of the great features the Dart developers have built into Dart, but moving forward it will become a template for how to write great Dart code. The ease with which this port was developed speaks to the great job the Dart team have done with the language.

As developers, we’re always wary of premature optimization even when working on a codebase like this one where performance is a key feature. Fortunately, it is already performing well with almost all of the included demos hitting a solid 60 FPS, though optimization efforts are a large part of the ongoing work on the project. You can see for yourself by viewing the demos and more in-depth benchmark results.

All feedback is more than welcome, and you can discuss the project either by joining the dartbox2d-discuss Google Group or the #dartbox2d IRC channel on FreeNode.

By Dominic Hamon, Google, Make the Web Faster team