[southerntofu]

Funny you should take this example. Unless you're building a skyscraper, for 1-2 floors clay is plenty good: in particular when mixed with wheat or other fibrous bodies (straw type), it's how many traditional houses have been built, and has many interesting properties:

- sourced from local material (use a different type of clay or straw if you need), no need for chemicals or for sand imports from depleted beaches on the other side of the world - recyclable to almost infinity (need a bigger/better house? just tear it down and reuse the materials) - cool in summer, warm in winter if you design it well - lasts for decades if your structure is designed well: i'm not aware of really old examples but it would be a surprise if the structure outlives us all (does someone have resources on this topic?)

So turns out your example was more interesting and less absurd than you originally thought. Just like server-side rendering uses an order of magnitude less resources (for n clients it's O(1) with caching, whereas client-side rendering is O(n)), it turns out clay is the perfect material to use an order of magnitude (or even more orders?) less resources to build your house than if you used concrete source from various polluting industries and endangered sand deposits.

[skohan]

Fair point re clay foundations, but I was talking about the tooling choice for server-side rendering, not server-side rendering itself. For instance if they had implemented this in Erlang or Go they likely wouldn't have run into this GC bottleneck they had to engineer around to be able to exceed 50 requests per second.

I'm a big fan of server-side rendering and am sure it could be used way more often to great effect.