When compiling to javaScript the dart2js compiler converts the string to an escaped utf format
\u043d\u041d...
I am not sure why his is done (the original file contains text strings that are in cyrillic, but the system (and hopefully DartEditor) use UTF).
Other compilers (like Closure or TypeScript) leave it as it is.
I am wondering if someone can explain:
Thanks.
When dart2js reads a string it decodes that string. For example if your string contained a \n it decodes it into a new line character. When dart2js writes the string out, it does needs to encode the strings again. For simplicity dart2js simply encodes everything that is not ASCII.
Please file a bug report, and we will have a look to see if it's easy to fix.
In the browser (at least in V8 in Chrome) a string is represented with 1 byte per character if there are no characters outside the range of 0-255. If there is just one character outside that range, then the string is represented as 2 bytes per character. So for a small number of Cyrillic characters this can be a more compact representation in terms of browser memory.
However I'm not aware of any measurements, and there may be reasons why this theoretical space saving does not work in practice.
