This is really neat stuff. I do not understand though why LING is not open-source already. If you are sincere in your claims for intentions of making it so, why would you wait until it is "mature" before doing so? Wouldn't it mature a lot faster if more people picked it up and tried to use it, submitted defects and even patches?
The demo about the vm+server startup time is interesting, but I am glad to know about the way they use Nginx to proxy the request twice to do the provisioning of the vm+server.<p>Edit: I wonder if the numbers would be similar if the example was done with HaLVM (<a href="https://github.com/GaloisInc/HaLVM" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/GaloisInc/HaLVM</a>).
For people who are interested but unable to get a connection, here's a saved page: <a href="http://f.cl.ly/items/07293W450C3F0r472u1O/Zerg%20demo%20-%20spawned%20for%20each%20web%20request.html" rel="nofollow">http://f.cl.ly/items/07293W450C3F0r472u1O/Zerg%20demo%20-%20...</a><p>I tweaked the background image URLs so they'd be absolute instead of relative, but otherwise it's unmodified.
I'm seeing 1.5 to 1.6 secs. Is that due to my crappy internet connection or is that simply what it is?<p>Because 1.5 secs per request, and more for somewhat more complex operations, seems long to me. As instance startup time it is impressive though! But they are designed to die after each request, right? Or is that just this example?
So what's being shown off here? Clearly it's impressive that a web server VM is loaded so quickly, but what's the key? Is it a carefully configured Xen VM? Or is it the use of Erlang?