These are questions for wise men with skinny arms

So this starts with trying to instal the Dart VM on RHEL 6 only to discover that the gcc installed might be too old for it to work correctly. I might try anyways later, but the experience sparked this train of thought. I originally wanted to write a little game solver in Dart to get for it outside of the web-app environment, which is decidedly not what it is designed to do, thinking it would be like Node.