[Ur] Strategy - UrWeb Backend

[Adam Chlipala]

Marc Weber wrote:
> Excerpts from Adam Chlipala's message of Wed Dec 08 00:40:43 +0100 2010:
>    
>> Which benefits do you see from server-side JavaScript?  I'll be really
>> surprised if any such system can get over the inherent costs of the
>> JavaScript language, to match the performance and security of Ur/Web.
>>      
> Performance does no longer matter much (unless you're Amazon - or
> google) - because servers are so cheap compared to development time -
> and they will be even cheaper tomorrow.
>    

I find it hard to believe that it doesn't matter if a web application 
server uses several times more memory than it needs to, but maybe we 
really have come to live in a world that crazy. ;)

> Benefits of JS target:
>   - never think about memory
>    

Can you expand on this point?  It sounds surprising.

>   - interface to existing code more easily (?)
>    

It's probably easier to interface with JavaScript libraries but harder 
to interface with C libraries, right?

>   - existing hosting services (heroku)
>    

Ur/Web is already easy to deploy on any standard VPS, and the decreased 
resource footprint means that you might not even need to think about 
multi-machine "scaling," in cases where the bloat of popular scripting 
language implementations would force you to pull in more hardware (and 
spend that valuable programmer time implementing distributed systems!).

All this is hypothetical, but I'm definitely not convinced that there 
aren't serious advantages to be had from whole-program optimizing 
compilation to native code without garbage collection.