Setting up a VS Code playground for Dart

I just want to test out some Dart code. Why does it take so long?

So you see a code snippet you want to try out. Or you have a Dart programming problem you want to try to solve in isolation. What is the fastest way to write that code and get it running?

In the following article I share the journey I took to answer that question.

A Whole New Flutter Project

My introduction to Dart was through Flutter, so naturally I would create a new Flutter project whenever I wanted to test out some Dart code.

This was slow, though. I was using Android Studio, which took a long time to start up. Then I would have to integrate the Dart code somehow into the Flutter UI. I usually did that by adding it to a button’s onPressed callback.

class HomeWidget extends StatelessWidget {
  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return RaisedButton(
      child: Text('Run'),
      onPressed: () {
        runCode();
      },
    );
  }
}
void runCode() {
  print('hello world');
}

Finally, I would have to start up an Android emulator or iOS simulator, which also took forever.

Launching lib/main.dart on Android SDK built for x86 in debug mode...
Running Gradle task…