Dart: Lazily Evaluating Static Variables Leads to Wackiness
It is now possible in Dart to initialize top-level (i.e. static) variables using any expression. The expression gets evaluated lazily. When I first heard about this, my instant reaction was fear because laziness and imperative programming don't really get along. At the time, I hadn't seen the blog post where Gilad admitted that plainly.Hence, I spent a couple hours that night trying to come up with ways this could lead to wackiness. I asked Gilad about it, and he said, "Laziness and statefulness can cause scary problems, I know. You can get into these Hesienbugs, where things only show up when you look, so as you debug the problem disappears."Just to prove the point, I came up with the following Dart program:import "dart:io";
import "dart:math";
var varA = changeVarB();
var varB = 1;
int changeVarB() {
varB += 1;
return 0;
}
main() {
print("$varB");
var seed = new Date.now().millisecondsSinceEpoch;
var nextBool = new Random(…
