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Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

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Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#81

Post by jmngomes »

andr wrote: post #42

I've played with some early betas of Dark and I must say being deployless may make a good headline, but there are many more-exciting features. There's visual programming, a concise OCaml-style language, a unique pub-sub mechanism baked right in, and integrated database support. It's a really fresh approach.

> deployless may make a good headline, but there are many more-exciting features. There's visual programming, a concise OCaml-style language, a unique pub-sub mechanism baked right in, and integrated database support.

So, everything that is currently delivered in the real world by technologies like OutSystems, which have an enterprise customer base, 1-click deploys, and that you can actually try for free.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#82

Post by jmngomes »

omnimus wrote: post #67
twic wrote: post #65

Looks like one thing the infrastructure doesn't automate is using the right SSL certificate: https://hellobirb.com/ (that company is an early adopter mentioned in https://medium.com/darklang/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-fina... )

SSL certificate automation is the hardest part of any stack.

Depending on how you approach it, it can be completely automated: https://github.com/Neilpang/acme.sh

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#83

Post by jmngomes »

kybernetikos wrote: post #15
trevyn wrote: post #8

Should probably replace with the first-party article: https://medium.com/darklang/dark-announces-3-5m-in-seed-fina...

That site also has the benefit that I don't have to sign my personal info over to oath and their thousands of partners to read it.

I use outline.com to avoid that: https://outline.com/q7MMgC

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#84

Post by maximilianroos »

tnolet wrote: post #80
maximilianroos wrote: post #59

The tone here is _extremely_ cynical. Before you jump from thinking a specific feature is wrong, to asserting the whole project is a waste of time: please take a moment to consider where your broad assertion might be wrong. In the words of Sam Altman: "it's easy/fun to say every new startup you hear about is bad. you will usually be right. you will never be successful." https://twitter.com/sama/status/571733273996488…

I guess this is to be expected. HN is totally not the target audience for this. A closed, proprietary coding system is bound to be scrutinized by a site that has “hacker” in its name. No idea what that tweet is meant to say though. People who are critical about startups are never successful? Really? You can easily argue for the opposite.

The tweet is supposed to say:

If 95% of things fail, you'll be correct 95% of the time by calling each thing a failure.

But you'll never be in the 5% yourself. (sure, an exaggeration to say you'll never be successful, but such is 140 characters)

(Agree with your points re audience. I'd hope people can differentiate between things they don't use and things that are useless)

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#85

Post by snops »

lazerwalker wrote: post #79
notjesse wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It only sounds maybe 1 step removed from where aws lambda’s are now. You fiddle with the code in the lambda IDE, and submit for deployment. Is this really that much different?

Most times I've worked with Lambda (or other competing cloud functions) it's been difficult or infeasible to run my function locally. Which means I can now ONLY test my code manually after a minute or so of deploy time. Separate from anything else about Dark, it appears to fundamentally avoid that problem.

With Azure Functions, the runtime[1] is open source, and the development tooling for VSCode makes it easy to run them locally [2], starting up in a few seconds. You pass in your database keys etc as environmental variables, and it integrates nicely with the IoT Hub tooling so you can debug the whole device sends message -> function gets hit flow in one window.

However, I have had this break in places before, and not really been able to figure out why from what is going on under the hood, needing to restart various parts to get it working. Checking the contents of the database is annoyingly manual, requiring a seperate GUI only tool[3] and hitting the refresh button a lot, a "watch" window would be much nicer. Profiling once deployed is also difficult, I ended up having to inject timestamps at various different places to try and measure end to end latency.

If Dark can give better tooling for debugging once deployed, it would be a definite advantage.

[1] https://github.com/Azure/azure-functions-host [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/funct... [3] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/details/data-explo...

To find out the surprising fact that Azure IoT makes no promises about maximum latency at all, not even a "soft" guarantee without SLA penalties.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#86

Post by avinium »

lazerwalker wrote: post #79
notjesse wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It only sounds maybe 1 step removed from where aws lambda’s are now. You fiddle with the code in the lambda IDE, and submit for deployment. Is this really that much different?

Most times I've worked with Lambda (or other competing cloud functions) it's been difficult or infeasible to run my function locally. Which means I can now ONLY test my code manually after a minute or so of deploy time. Separate from anything else about Dark, it appears to fundamentally avoid that problem.

Can't speak for Lambda, but Azure Functions is trivial to run/test locally.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#87

Post by greyskull »

lazerwalker wrote: post #79
notjesse wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It only sounds maybe 1 step removed from where aws lambda’s are now. You fiddle with the code in the lambda IDE, and submit for deployment. Is this really that much different?

Most times I've worked with Lambda (or other competing cloud functions) it's been difficult or infeasible to run my function locally. Which means I can now ONLY test my code manually after a minute or so of deploy time. Separate from anything else about Dark, it appears to fundamentally avoid that problem.

For Lambda, SAM Local [0] exists. Not to say that it magically addresses all the local development cases, but it's there.

[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/serverless-application-model/lat...

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#88

Post by arethuza »

snops wrote: post #85
lazerwalker wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most times I've worked with Lambda (or other competing cloud functions) it's been difficult or infeasible to run my function locally. Which means I can now ONLY test my code manually after a minute or so of deploy time. Separate from anything else about Dark, it appears to fundamentally avoid that problem.

With Azure Functions, the runtime[1] is open source, and the development tooling for VSCode makes it easy to run them locally [2], starting up in a few seconds. You pass in your database keys etc as environmental variables, and it integrates nicely with the IoT Hub tooling so you can debug the whole device sends message -> function gets hit flow in one window. However, I have had this break in places before, and not…

I've done a fair number of Azure Functions - mostly triggered from messages on storage queues and running locally under Visual Studio they mostly run fine with an occasional glitch where the function won't trigger - easy enough to stop it and run again. I don't find it a huge problem though.

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#89

Post by tiborsaas »

tnolet wrote: post #19

The marketing reminds me of the famo.us launch. “Everything completely different and proprietary and we don’t have any actual real life examples”

For some reason I get the same vibe. Let's hope they learned from the famo.us case (badumtsss).

Re: Dark emerges with ‘deployless’ software model

#90

Post by arethuza »

tnolet wrote: post #16

This reminds me a lot of the Salesforce Apex platform where the language, runtime, datamodel, hosting and all infra is part of one package. But Salesforce has a very specific niche, this seems to be for general purpose web dev and I’m pretty sure it will be a hard time getting people to switch.

Isn't the platform part of Salesforce also pitched as a general purpose application development platform? (force.com or something).

Microsoft used to pitch their CRM in the same way as an "XRM".

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