I think you misunderstood Kevin’s point. I assume you’re reacting to:

> With Dart 2, Dart becomes a first-class compiled-to-JavaScript language

This doesn’t try to say that Dart 2 is a first compiled-to-JavaScript language. It says that Dart 2 is leaving the previous “develop with DartVM, release in JS” model and adds a second Dart-to-JS compiler for development (Dart Dev Compiler, or DDC) — thus becoming first-class on the web compiler front.

As an aside, Dart 1 was one of the first languages that truly compiled (i.e. not transpiled) to JavaScript, long before Kotlin (whose first JS compiler was actually based on Dart) but that’s not the point here. Java, of course, had GWT (and probably other such tools) long before that.