Using strings for names.

[lrhn]

You are using strings for names, rather than Symbol.
I'm not unsympathetic to that, symbols are more trouble than they are usually worth, but it can cause issues for dart2js minification.

It also means that library private names are simply strings starting with _, which is ... all in all, probably an advantage.

I'd love to be rid of Symbol, but it does have a valid use in web minification.

[jakemac53]

Ya, I did very intentionally use Strings instead. Ultimately the strings must exist anyways in the code so I don't believe Symbols provide any real value that couldn't also be achieved with Strings.

Currently if you want to serialize/deserialize (to/from a Map) an instance of some class using dart:mirrors you have to toString the Symbols representing the names of each field, in order to create the key to insert into the map. So for that reason today afaik the Symbols all have their unminified names in their toString representation, and if they didn't it would anyways be broken for some of our core use cases.