Daco Harkes
Senior Software Engineer at Google
Seedorf, Uri, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDaco Harkes is a Senior Software Engineer at Google with 12 years of experience focused on compiler engineering, language interop, and developer tooling for Dart and Flutter. He leads work on the Dart VM and compilers, notably driving FFI improvements and tools like ffigen and jnigen to automatically generate bindings for C, Objective-C, Java, and Kotlin. Based in Switzerland, he blends research pedigree from a PhD-level background in programming languages with hands-on contributions to flagship repos such as dart-lang/sdk and flutter/engine. His work spans AOT codegen fixes, memory and native-asset packaging, and migration of core runtime features—efforts that quietly enable seamless native integration for thousands of packages. An open-source-first engineer, he designs features publicly and invites collaboration, combining deep low-level expertise with pragmatic build and tooling improvements.
12 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Leadership, Leadership at ChristformationDriestarTU Delft
Dutch, English
Stackoverflow
406reputation
17kreached
10answers
0questions
Github Skills (33)
c-language10
mobile-development10
flutter-apps10
cffi10
android-development10
android10
foreign10
ffi10
flutter-game10
dart10
cprogramming-language10
native-android10
flutter10
cplus9
code-generation9
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
dart-lang/sdk
Oct 2018 - Jan 2023
The Dart SDK, including the VM, JS and Wasm compilers, analysis, core libraries, and more.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:582 commits, 2 PRs, 3 pushes in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Daco has been primarily involved in enhancing the Dart SDK, specifically in areas related to FFI (Foreign Function Interface) and code generation. Their contributions include implementing and optimizing methods for memory copying, implementing `Native` annotations. Their work includes refactoring, ensuring correct functionality related to variable length arrays, and fixing code generation issues, particularly in the context of AOT (Ahead-of-Time) compilation.
dartsdkdart2jscore-librariesflutter
flutter/engine
Jul 2020 - Jan 2023
The Flutter engine
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:33 reviews, 11 commits, 26 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Daco primarily contributed to migrating code related to `Dart_WeakPersistentHandle` to `Dart_FinalizableHandle`, impacting core engine functionality. They made changes to several files related to Fuchsia platform integration, including modifications to system and file loading components, demonstrating a focus on platform-specific engine aspects. Additionally, the user updated the `run_tests.py` script to use `dart pub get` and migrated from `@FfiNative` to `@Native`, showing proficiency in build and Dart language features.
flutterflutter-enginec-plus-plus
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