Yes. Dart can be used as a general purpose programming language.
Advantages:
- It's fast, already faster than V8, and catching up to the JVM (Though it starts up much quicker).
- It's great for scripting on macos/linux. You can prefix a source file with #!/usr/bin/env dart
- Backed by a large team/company who are developing it in the open, along with an active community.
- Good documentation and articles.
Disadvantages:
- It's new. There are far more libraries available for Java, Python and node.js than for Dart.
- There are likely to be changes to the core IO libraries before it hits 1.0.
- No built-in support on cloud-hosting platforms, though there is a heroku buildpack.
Note you can build GUI applications using dart2js and chrome packaged apps.