[Ur] Strategy - UrWeb Backend

[Stephane Le Dorze]

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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