I am following UrWeb (silently) since months (if not years), and I find it really interesting. But today I would give it no credit in its current incarnation, because I think it lacks some important factors to succeed. (mainly with a social dimension).
Indeed, for a language/framework to break throught, it needs to get momentum with a big/growing community and to play with current/hypped technologies, take advantage of working with existing librairies and getting a decent tooling. The latters are not easy for a such radical technology as UrWeb but that's a reality, disregarded how beautiful and well crafted it is. I think that its current backend and the fact it has no way to integrate existing stuff easily are two show stoppers for urweb (a FFI via C only does not target the right community). When I think about it, I immediatly see a JS backend. Just being able to integrate this community and run on NodeJS for instance or take advantage of existing JS APIs and Tools. This is not the case today. I was wondering what others are thinking about it strategically? Would a JS backend be hard to integrate with the current compiler which is already targetting the JS frontend?. I see a lot more issues with the integration of existing JS code (APIs) .. here a good example would perhaps be to simply trust explicitely (ala HaXe). Another question: are there other reasons than timing not to have targeted a LLVM backend instead of the current one? I don't want to hurt anyone nor to denigrate, I really appreciate the technology behind urweb, I am impressed and think that it goes the right way. So naturally I don't want to see it disappearing. Take this as the expression of a critical mind and, beforeall, a positive feedback. Stephane Le Dorze
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