Well to be honest, the front end in discourse is incredibly bloated. I have previously used a Go based forum platform that had no front end compilation. Largely because all the required css and js were small enough to serve easily with the page HTML. It worked well but was not FOSS and isn’t available anymore. The fact that you need to “compile” a front end at all for discourse seems like an anti-pattern to me.
Hmmm, there are some very smart people on the project so I’d be wary of making generalising and disparaging remarks. There are always nuanced reasons for things that a team of clever people have thought deeply about.
Discourse is a sophisticated web app with a very user friendly native app-like interface. Impossible to implement in a browser without some heavy use of JavaScript unless you want your page refreshing regularly all day long? (Putting huge burden on your web server in the process!)
“Compilation” includes minification to reduce downloads to assist with slow internet connections and browser memory footprint. Hardly controversial?
There is also some transpiling to convert some Ember to native JavaScript I believe. Ditto.
6 Likes
As we don’t have any plans to rewrite the app in either Rust or Go I think this conversation is a little moot.
I’m going to close this topic off now. 
19 Likes