css-only-chat VS starlark

The idea of using CSS-triggered requests for analytics was really cool to me when I first encountered it.

One guy on twitter (no longer available) used it for mouse tracking: overlay an invisible grid of squares on the page, each with a unique background image triggered on hover. Each background image sends a specific request to the server, which interprets it!

For fun one summer, I extended that idea to create a JS-free "css only async web chat": https://github.com/kkuchta/css-only-chat

Isn't CSS Turing complete? Someone even implemented a chat client in it: https://github.com/kkuchta/css-only-chat

If it's something like a new reply to an issue raised, then you can either have it so these only show when the page reloads. Depending on how critical these notifications are, probably not the best solution. An alternative is to have a page that never stops loading. I've never actually used this approach, but I remember this guy used the approach for a JS-free chat system: https://github.com/kkuchta/css-only-chat

Here's an actual CSS-only implementation of a chat app that I happened to stumble across yesterday while tinkering: https://github.com/kkuchta/css-only-chat

The implementations and users page mentioned above:

https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark/blob/master/users.md

Starlark: Starlark is a language for describing build transformations, inspired by Python, but with features that make it suitable for embedding in software like Bazel. It can be used for configuration generation due to its capability for deterministic evaluation and expressing complex build transformations.

In the design of Starlark (https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark), I often had to push back against new feature requests to keep the language simple. I explicitly listed simplicity as a design goal.i

Of course, the scope of the language is not the same as general purpose languages, but there's always pressure from the users to add more things. I also think many people underestimate the cost of adding new features: it's not just about adding the code in every compiler/interpreter, specifying every edge-case in a spec, updating all the tooling for the language and writing tutorials; it's also a cost on everyone who will have to read any of the code.

one of the benefits of starlark (unlike python): "Starlark is suitable for use in highly parallel applications. An application may invoke the Starlark interpreter concurrently from many threads, without the possibility of a data race, because shared data structures become immutable due to freezing." from https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark/blob/master/spec.md - it's not python, you can't do recursion (!) and it's more limited (you can't read a file in bazel, and parse it, you have to make this operation into the graph somehow)

You can do the same in Bazel which uses Starlark for its BUILD files. Starlark is a dialect of Python so it makes it super easy to work with.

Make sense. We do not use Python actually, the build language is starlark, which is the config lang used by bazel. https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark

Have you seen Starlark? It's not too far from that, but safer in a number of ways: https://github.com/bazelbuild/starlark