A JavaScript-Free Front End

It's got a badge and everything.

A lot of things are performed on the server, and then the server responds with a "flash" which is basically a little bar that says "Data saved." or "There was an error: ...".

There are a few places where I used a simple 5-liner to validate a field or something.

Unfortunately there was one place where I needed some heavier JS (for which I used Mithril.js), but it was absolutely required for when you're editing an invoice. You wouldn't want to edit line items and wait for a server response every time you make one change, so I simply determined that this was an area where I had no choice. Mithril simply modifies the DOM inside the element, and then saving is a plain old POST request when you submit the form after you've made all of your changes.

The unfortunate reality is that I couldn't completely free myself from JavaScript, but got a lot closer.

Here's a recurring story in the programming field.

A new variation on technology is highly successful. The field starts using it enthusiastically, but doesn't keep track of the costs and cost/benefit. The new tech gets rather overused. Some people come out with optimizations. (Usually involving what amounts to caching.) Other insightful contrarian people take a minimalist approach. Rinse and repeat.

Once aware, one can spot this cycle happening. It is left as an exercise to the reader, how this can be used to profit.

No one seems to get that the C++ still works and in nearly all cases is faster, compiles very fast and is very quick to develop with now that everyone has shared their code and since functional algos have been added to the stl. This all happens with the memory safety people require since we have shared and unique pointers and Intel's thread building blocks. My fully featured application is 3.7 MB and takes 12-15 MB of ram to run and handles 100k+ requests per second from my laptop. Those stats aren't even that good with the exception of the rps.

If going fully native isn't your game then how about nginx with the plethora of 3rd party modules that are supplied by other developers? Maybe you just really like js? Maybe js isn't the best but you're going to use it anyway because you know it and other people have already written a lot of your code for you? Maybe you just feel like wasting money on more machines instead of one vps instance and a cache-everything cdn?

You do you I guess.