Wildcard Exports – Because Typing Every File Name is for Cavemen

[stan-at-work]

The Struggle is Real

Look, we love Dart, but manually exporting every single file in our project is like sorting our laundry by individual thread count. Painful. Time-consuming. Possibly a form of cruel and unusual punishment.

Wouldn't it be great if we could just do something like this?

export 'src/**/*.dart';  // Just grab everything. Yes, everything.
export 'lib/*';          // Take my files. All of them.
export '**/*.dart';      // Absolute chaos, but in a good way.

Current Reality

Right now, we have to type out every single export like some sort of unpaid intern:

export 'src/models/user.dart';
export 'src/models/post.dart';
export 'src/utils/helper.dart';
export 'src/utils/logger.dart';
export 'src/utils/whyDoIHaveToDoThis.dart';
export 'src/config/constants.dart';
// ...and 500 more files later

This isn't 1995. Computers should be doing the tedious work for us.

Why This is Important

• Less typing = fewer typos = happier developers
• More time for actual coding (or pretending to code while scrolling memes)
• Other languages have this feature; let's not get left behind in the stone age

Conclusion

Please, Dart team, spare our fingers. Let us unleash the power of wildcards and export like true modern developers.

Sincerely,
Every Dev Who’s Ever Had to Manually Export 100+ Files

[RohitSaily]

In addition to exports I would like to see it for imports too. It would make it consistent and it could be useful for treating a folder as a single component that gets imported. This could be useful for grouping internal code without having to make export files for every grouping.

import 'package:mypackage/src/menu_widgets/*.dart';
//The rest of this file assembles the various components defined across multiple files in the "menu_widgets" folder.

[lrhn]

Not a new idea. See dart-lang/language#1424, dart-lang/language#1969 and (still open) dart-lang/language#1709 for examples.

The arguments against are also still the same. It's error prone to blanket import everything in a directory.
It also depends on the underlying platform's file system for deciding which files that is, and how they're cased, which adds a second level of uncertainty if you have case-insensitive file systems. (If you import foo/bar/* and foo/bar/barbary.dart, you get library clashes if the * expands to BARBAR~1.DART for some reason.)

Closing as duplicate of dart-lang/language#1709. If you have any brilliant ideas on how to make this not as fragile and error-prone, do write them there.

(And cut the "Cavemen" part. Writing stupidly long imports is for IDEs, and IDEs don't like to be called cavemen!)

[mveroukis]

My solution is to just not export anything at all. I don't care if other developers choose to access what I would otherwise make private (I place all my "private" stuff in /src anyway). No way I'm gonna waste my time making sure to export every single file. I kinda like dart, but I can't take it seriously as a language. I wish we could use Kotlin for Flutter instead.

[stan-at-work]

My solution is to just not export anything at all. I don't care if other developers choose to access what I would otherwise make private (I place all my "private" stuff in /src anyway). No way I'm gonna waste my time making sure to export every single file. I kinda like dart, but I can't take it seriously as a language. I wish we could use Kotlin for Flutter instead.

lol

[stan-at-work]

My solution is to just not export anything at all. I don't care if other developers choose to access what I would otherwise make private (I place all my "private" stuff in /src anyway). No way I'm gonna waste my time making sure to export every single file. I kinda like dart, but I can't take it seriously as a language. I wish we could use Kotlin for Flutter instead.

Dart can be taken seriously, but just not at this time. Maybe in 2-3 years, when the whole backlog of really important, and obvious issues are implemented into the lang. That makes it a multi purpose language and not only a flutter or wanna be web language.

Its OK, but far from the level of a language like Java, or C# or C... maybe someday in 2-3-4 years... (when the flutter-web and ai hype train has died)