Dart Sass is in Beta

Last weekend was three days long and the weather in Seattle was gorgeous. Contrary to stereotype, spring here is often characterized by bright sunny days that aren’t too hot, and on days like that I love to curl up on the armchair in my living room and write some code. This weekend, that meant finishing up the last few outstanding @extend bugs, finally making Dart Sass fully sass-spec compatible^[1].

This is the milestone we’ve decided would mark the transition from alpha to beta releases of Dart Sass. Dart Sass 1.0.0-beta.1 is up now on npm, pub, and Chocolatey, and I encourage people to start trying it out in their own applications. We’ve fixed all the bugs we know about, so now we need our diligent users to find the rest of them and tell us!

Next Steps: Ruby SassNext Steps: Ruby Sass permalink

There are a number of intentional behavior differences between Dart Sass and the existing implementations. All of these differences are things we think improve the language, and many of them have also made Dart Sass much easier to implement, but we recognize that they can make migration more difficult. That’s why our next priority is updating Ruby Sass by deprecating old behavior or adding new behavior, as necessary.

Our long-term compatibility goal is to ensure, as much as possible, that if a stylesheet compiles without warnings on Ruby Sass, it will also work with Dart Sass. So a substantial portion of our effort in the near future be spent on ensuring all the compatibility issues are fixed. Once that’s done, we’ll release those changes as part of Ruby Sass 3.5.

Next Steps: Dart SassNext Steps: Dart Sass permalink

On the Dart front, we have a number of issues outstanding that we want to resolve before we release a stable version of 1.0.0. The majority of these issues are focused on one thing: compatibility with the node-sass render() API. This will make it easy to integrate Dart Sass into existing JS ecosystem tools and workflows, since anything that works with node-sass will automatically work with Dart Sass as well.

Try It OutTry It Out permalink

As with all Dart Sass releases, 1.0.0-beta.1 is available on many platforms. Give it a try on whichever is easiest for you:

• Standalone tarballs are available on GitHub, which you can just download and run from the command line.

• Chocolatey users on Windows can just run choco install sass --pre (or choco upgrade sass --pre if you already have it).

• You can get the pure-JavaScript version from npm by running npm install -g dart-sass.

• Or if you’re a Dart user, you can run pub global activate sass.

I’m very pleased to have 1.0.0-beta.1 tagged and out in the world, but the work of a language maintainer is never done. I’m back to work, and if I hustle, hopefully I’ll be writing about 1.0.0-rc.1 soon!