Ask HN: Is there any apps out there built using single lang for the whole stack?

2 points·mp77··6 comments

I am working on a web app and thinking of using javascript (react, node, express, mongo etc) as only language for full stack of this app. Is there any apps out there (preferably the ones you worked on) that are using single language (javascript, python, ruby etc) for the full stack of the app? And what are pros and cons you faced building the stack in same language?

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Do understand you'll need to use Compile-to-JS languages to achieve this since browsers can only understand JS. You have some options given the recent popularity of Compile-to-JS. I personally know about ClojureScript and ScalaJS, which would allow you to use those languages for both front and back end. There may be options like that for Ruby and Python as well.

For a real life Scala.js app see https://github.com/jducoeur/Querki

Huh? You can't reasonably use Python or Ruby on the frontend, so there aren't webapps using Python or Ruby for their whole stack.

Maybe not today (reasonbably). But, until recently there were many apps (and still possibly many are) using Django (python) and Ruby on Rails (Ruby) as their development stack for web apps. Atleast for Ruby on Rails, I know of some popular apps that were built using it like Airbnb, Github, Spotify, Twitch, Soundcloud etc.

No, you've misunderstood. OP said:

"only language for full stack of this app"

The sites you mentioned used JavaScript on the client side, so Python and Ruby were not used as the only language for the full stack of those sites.

> You can't reasonably use Python or Ruby on the frontend

You can use Ruby via Opal, and there are a few front-end (and at least one isomorphic full-stack) frameworks.

For Python there is Brython, but I don't know of any FE frameworks.

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