Hi I'm Brian, one of the member of the Lumen team. I'll try to address some of the questions I've seen in this thread:<p>1. Why?<p>We've seen every growing complexity in building, maintaining, extending, and debugging client side applications. There are several reasons why this is but in our opinion how JS handles concurrency (the Event Loop) is a primary factor. Erlang's concurrency model is superior (also our opinion) in how a developer reasons about concurrency. We want to bring this power to building client side web apps.<p>2. I'm afraid of [it] being over-engineered, and hard to contribute to.<p>Lumen itself is just the beginning of what we hope is an eco system of tooling and potential framework pieces for building web applications. When building Elixir or Erlang applications developers are not expected to be contributing back to the BEAM or to even understand how it works. Lumen will be in a similar position. When we finally get to `mix install lumen` you will likely only be including Lumen as a dependency in your apps. Higher level functionality will emerge that use Lumen to compile to WASM. However, we highly encourage people with experience in Rust, compiler design, runtime design, Erlang/BEAM, or just general curiosity to get involved in developing Lumen :)<p>3. even Chris McCord said that in all his years of consulting, he's only gotten a handful of requests for these types of apps<p>Chris works here at DockYard, and this is because we don't put Chris on our PWA/SPA projects. While there is an obvious demand for LiveView to relieve people from needing a client side framework there are most definitely many clients and plenty of projects where client side apps make sense.<p>4.an alternative BEAM implementation that behaves like a regular VM rather than BEAM?<p>Not entirely, although some concessions need to be made when working within the security model of the web. I would very much like it is the browser vendors would give up the argument that Web Workers fulfill the threading requirement of WASM as I personally feel that is disingenuous. I'm hoping that as Lumen develops and (hopefully) picks up steam/influence we can start to see some of these features land for real.<p>5. Due to size issues I probably wouldn't want to ship the entire BEAM to my users<p>Correct, and we aren't advocating for this. Lumen is currently in a very early stage of development and we haven't even implemented any compilation optimizations like dead code elimination. There are many other WASM specific optimizations that could cut the footprint size by 50% and this is before we even gzip, which WASM is designed to respond well to despite being a binary.<p>I'll keep a running list of responses in this thread if more questions come up.