Advanced Dart Programming & Concurrency for Africa

Course outline and learning expectations

This is a tutor-led course. The outline shows what your tutor will cover; teaching materials and examinations are provided directly to enrolled students.

What you will learn

• By the end of this advanced Dart programming course, the learner will be able to:
• Apply Dart's type system, generic constraints, class modifiers and exhaustive patterns to complex domain models.
• Design stable, maintainable and well-documented public APIs for Dart libraries.
• Structure large Dart codebases with clear boundaries, dependency inversion and reusable components.
• Control advanced asynchronous workflows with futures, streams, stream transformers, zones and cancellation strategies.
• Use isolates and message passing for CPU-intensive work without shared mutable state.
• Diagnose performance problems with measurement, profiling and memory analysis.
• Compare JIT and AOT execution and compile Dart to appropriate supported targets.
• Build resilient software with comprehensive tests, deterministic error handling and validation.
• Engineer, document and package a production-quality Dart toolkit for an African data or operational use case.

Modules

1. 1

   Dart type-system mastery

   Static and runtime typesType inference and promotion boundariesGeneric variance and bounded type parametersCallable objects, typedefs and advanced function typesClass modifiers: `abstract`, `base`, `interface`, `final`, `sealed` and `mixin`Exhaustive modelling with sealed types and patterns
2. 2

   Advanced domain modelling

   Immutable value modelsEquality, hashing and canonical dataRecords versus named domain typesComposition, dependency inversion and separation of concernsValidation at system boundariesModelling high-integrity education, finance, logistics or health datasets
3. 3

   Library architecture and API design

   Public and private library boundariesDesigning consistent names and type signaturesBackward-compatible API evolutionError and result modellingDocumentation comments and generated API referencesPackage layout for maintainability and reuse
4. 4

   Advanced asynchronous programming

   Event queue and microtask queue behaviourCoordinating and limiting concurrent futuresAdvanced stream creation and transformationSingle-subscription and broadcast streamsError propagation through asynchronous pipelinesZones, timeouts, retries and cancellation strategies
5. 5

   Isolates and parallel computation

   Dart's isolate model and isolated memory`Isolate.run()` for one-off computationLong-lived workers with `Isolate.spawn()``SendPort`, `ReceivePort` and message protocolsTransferable data and isolate limitationsParallel project: process a large regional dataset without blocking the main isolate
6. 6

   Performance and memory engineering

   Measuring before optimisingWriting reproducible benchmarksCPU profiling and allocation analysis with Dart DevToolsAlgorithmic complexity and collection choicesReducing unnecessary allocation and data copyingComparing synchronous, asynchronous and isolate-based solutions
7. 7

   Runtime, compilation and interoperability

   Dart VM execution modelJIT development and AOT deployment conceptsNative executables and supported web compilation targetsAssertions, build modes and environment declarationsSafe process and file-system interaction with `dart:io`Optional introduction to native interoperability and `dart:ffi`
8. 8

   Production package engineering and capstone

   Layered test strategy and asynchronous test controlTest doubles, fixtures, boundary cases and failure injectionStatic analysis, strict linting and documentation qualityPackage versioning and release readinessPerformance acceptance criteriaCapstone: a concurrent market-data processor, school analytics engine,