Will the code be theoretically runnable elsewhere though?
I guess my two concerns about solutions like this are always A) vendor lock-in B) whether it's too big of a project for any one company and requires a community of contributors to realize the vision.
In the short term it doesn't really matter because clearly being able to build an app is a huge step up from not being able to build an app regardless (which is why companies like Bubble.is are doing so well), but in the long term it seems like there are 10 - 15 companies working on this so eventually there will be more options and those factors will be key differentiators.
Our goal is making it super easy to build and run backends, and so if the first step was "install kubernetes" I don't think we'd have realized our goal. We don't have a goal of running these apps elsewhere. However, we don't like the lock-in either, as it's a blocker to people trying Dark, so we're trying to figure out ways to avoid that.
A current thought is perhaps allowing you to export your application compiled to Node or similar if you decide to stop using Dark. (Data is already easy to export, so we're mostly worried about code).
This is probably going to be the next blog post I write about this, because it's pretty front and center to the business.
This is the first time I've heard the concern of the project being too big for one company. I personally don't worry about it because it's so hard to move a small team in the same direction that I don't think a large community of volunteers will be a better fit.
Yeah I agree Dark should definitely run apps by default. And just to be clear I'm guessing that currently vendor lock-in is probably mostly a concern for folks who already know how to code, who wouldn't necessarily use it anyway if that specific blocker were removed. E.g. since I'm already a full stack developer, the things I'd be looking at are more like whether it would make hiring easier rather than whether it would be better than hiring a dev shop to build an MVP.
I guess another option would be having Dark function more as an app-store-like intermediary between the hardware and software. E.g. telling users they need X, Y, and Z infrastructure and letting them deploy it to whatever cloud they wanted, and having dark just charge for orchestrating that and for providing whatever other services.
In terms of a community, I guess I meant more in terms of getting developers to create libraries for data processing, in terms of things like HTML parsers for scraping webpages and other stuff that is essential for choosing a language but where it's hard to see how it would be viable for one company to build out all that stuff. Unless the plan is just to let folks run code in other languages.
> mostly a concern for folks who already know how to code, who wouldn't necessarily use it anyway if that specific blocker were removed
Yes, I think that's right. There's a lot of folks who have strong feelings about this but who aren't necessarily our target user. I know that's going to cause a lot of problems but what can you do :-/
> I guess another option would be having Dark function more as an app-store-like intermediary between the hardware and software.
Yeah, this very much isn't what we're trying to build, or the business we want to be in :)
> In terms of a community, I guess I meant more in terms of getting developers to create libraries for data processing
Gotcha! Yes indeed, there will be a package manager very much like npm/cargo/rubygems, for just this sort of thing. We plan to make it extremely easy to create and share packages.
> I know that's going to cause a lot of problems but what can you do
That's a good point, in the sense that even if less technical people don't care about certain issues, they're often not going to adopt the product without first soliciting advice from people who do care about those issues. So that just means potentially needing to build out a lot of stuff knowing that people won't actually use it for a long time.
Sort of like our product and the OAuth issue, which we're finally on track to (mostly) solve with a Gmail add-on but it's obviously been several years at this point.
I guess my two concerns about solutions like this are always A) vendor lock-in B) whether it's too big of a project for any one company and requires a community of contributors to realize the vision.
In the short term it doesn't really matter because clearly being able to build an app is a huge step up from not being able to build an app regardless (which is why companies like Bubble.is are doing so well), but in the long term it seems like there are 10 - 15 companies working on this so eventually there will be more options and those factors will be key differentiators.