[Ur] Strategy - UrWeb Backend

[Karn Kallio]

> 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.

This has been true for the last few decades, but the age of hardware 
improvements may be almost over.  Clock frequency has stopped increasing since 
about 5 years, limited by heat dissipation I believe.  Shrinking die feature 
sizes to even a couple of nanometers gives only about a 100x increase in 
transistor density.  So the industry may be approaching physical limits within 
the next 5 to 10 years that will stall hardware improvements.  Then at the end 
of the hardware era the only way forward will be software.

Disclaimer:  I am not knowledgeable about hardware and of course I can't know 
the future ... only that maybe the inevitable end (physics limits trivially 
mean there has to be an end) of "cheaper tomorrow" might not be so far ahead

> 
> Benefits of JS target:
>  - never think about memory
>  - interface to existing code more easily (?)
>  - existing hosting services (heroku)
> 
> You already said that you don't want to target the masses. Having some
> more users helping testing would be fine though :)
> 
> Writing tutorials is probably more important right now than having
> NodeJS support. If there are enough skilled users someone will pick it
> up and implement it anyway (?)
> 
> Marc Weber