Am I understanding correctly that you have reimplemented threads on an application level, instead of the OS level? So your application's threads (fibers, whatever) can be pre-empted by the OS, because the OS doesn't care about your scheduler when it's handling its own processes?
This is absolutely correct. And, if you check, this is what any system that wants to be able to manage tens of thousands of threads does (not necessarily with the exact same techniques). Including all major databases, all large scale virtual machines, etc. Recent versions of MacOS X even provide system libraries to simplify the implementation of such user-level threading (under the name of Grand Central Dispatch).
Am I also understanding correctly that there's no priority system for your threading implementation?
Actually, there is one. It is just not exported to userland yet.
Ah, I think I finally understand your point. It is about compatibility, not about paradigm, is it?
If so, you may be happy to learn that the low-level layers of Opa can already access other databases. The feature is not accessible at high-level yet because we are going to make a number of breaking changes before long, but eventually, we do intend to give access to most mainstream databases. Would this solve your problem?
because html, javascript, and browsers are soooo robust and versatile
Good point. We had really hard times tweaking the compiler until it produced JavaScript that worked on all browsers (note: in our books, IE7 is not a browser), or html that worked in all browsers, and with linking with all mainstream JS libraries (note: thanks Facebook for the nice code provided, that explicitly depends on server misconfigurations and/or browser bugs and suddenly stops working when confronted to a standards-compliant web browser and a well-configured server), and with getting our Comet to work with all the different possible interpretations of "asynchronous".
But that is not the point. The point is that this is a problem that *every* non-trivial web application needs to face. The point is that we faced it and we beat it, so that Opa developers do not need to. Should a new browser version arise and cause new incompatibilities, *we* will be the ones doing the heavy debugging until we can produce a new version of the compiler and runtime that lets developers forget about the incompatibilities.
So yes, these brittle bases made our work difficult (and interesting
Caveat I'm part of the Opa team. Well, worse than that, I am the architect-in-chief.
The problem is that you've just created a monolithic application that ties one single database to one single front-end. What happens when you want to swap out databases?[...] It's just another language that corporate developers not only need to learn, but need to sell to management [...] But as it is, it's an interesting idea, nothing more - I'd never let it in my development shop, and even if I did, the architectural committee would hang me out to dry.
I can understand the issue. Would this calm your concerns if I told you that
And "compiling to JavaScript" is just ignorant - there's no such thing. Maybe the author means "translating to JavaScript"?
Of course, what do I know about compilation? I only have a PhD on the topic and 9 years of professional experience.
That's without security or distribution, without database, without a syntax for css or html, but it looks somewhat possible for some languages, with considerable effort. Say, if you attempt to do this, don't hesitate to ping me, it might be interesting.
Where there's a will, there's a relative.