Improve the output of print(someJsObject)

[kevmoo]

With the use of interop, it'll be common for folks to print(someObject) which may be a native JS object. While in many cases we don't provide a "pretty" output, because of tricks that ClosureCompiler and others do with their types, we could certainly improve the experience.

Here's an example of window.console.debug(...) vs print(...) of the same object.

While Lf { idToken: ...} is not perfect, it's much more useful than [object Object]

Could we create a slightly more helpful output here? Even something opt-in could be really useful.

See discussion here: Janamou/firebase3-dart#11 (comment)

[jacob314]

Should be trivial to make print redirect to console.log instead of calling toString and then redirecting to console.log.

[floitschG]

print takes a String. Redirecting it to console.log wouldn't change anything.
We can't just change the signature of print, since the underlying zones trust the string type.

[kevmoo]

print takes a String. Redirecting it to console.log wouldn't change anything.

No, it takes Object. https://api.dartlang.org/stable/1.19.0/dart-core/print.html

There is a bunch of logic with dart2js compiled code to figure out a reasonable toString for unknown objects. I'm just talking about expanding it to be a bit more helpful.

[floitschG]

Yes. that was confusing.
What I meant to say: the underlying printToConsole function takes a String.

Admittedly, we could make printToConsole take an Object too, but then the output would be different depending on whether there is a zone or not. (And we are not going to change the API for zones).

I do agree that it would be nice to have the output of JS-objects be nicer. However, it's not as easy as just removing the line = "$object"; from the core's print method.