Google has released the beta of the Dart SDK which includes an editor with much improved code completion and analysis, so it might be regarded as another step toward an IDE of sorts.

Dart is Google's JavaScript replacement and compared to Google's other language, Go, it is much more controversial. Google would like to get us to use Dart as a way of giving an edge to its Chrome browser. If it can get enough users then Firefox and IE would have to play catch up - assuming the politics allowed them to even move in that direction. 

The new Dart SDK includes an upgraded editor, written in Java, with a much better code analysis engine which reports warnings and errors at compile time. The new engine is 20% faster and it supplies the errors as you type.

There are a few additional new features - rename library refactoring, convert method to getter and vice versa, import library and create  class and create part quick fixes. Probably the most important feature is that code completion is better. It will now recognize the nearest match based on a camel case typing of the significant letters - e.g. you type iE and it finds isEmpty. 

Moving away from the editor, the Dart to JavaScript compiler, Dart2js, now produces code that is nearly four times more compact. It also shows a 10% speed improvement. The JavaScript compiler is important because at the moment it is what you have to use if you want your Dart creations to run on any browser. 

The alternative is to use the Dart VM, which is now 33% faster and features brand new SIMD acceleration. It is also easier to deploy a Dart app using the pub deploy command, which builds a directory structure and copies resources to the server.  

Dartium, the combination of Dart and Chromium is also now faster in WebGL. 

The biggest news is probably that the SDK has now made it to beta. Who knows - one day perhaps Dart will graduate to a final release. Google, however, is well known for keeping projects in beta well past their testing date...