So instead of having to deal with plenty of small ajax calls you just build an app as it would work in plain HTML and just use turbolinks to leverage AJAX.
Sure it can be very efficient, but it's a terrible default.
When DHH state: > except, maybe, compatibility issues with some existing JavaScript packages
Some ? Don't you mean most ? Even Twitter Bootstrap will leak memory if used in a turbolink app.
When coffeescript is pushed as default, I'm ok, at worst you don't use it and you have a useless gem. But turbolink is harmful if you don't know what you are doing.
TurboLink always replace the whole body, not just part of the page. There's no input focus to maintain. Server side render a page the same regardless of whether it's fetched normally or through TurboLink. Links fallback correctly on JS-disabled client.
This does not seem like a super great idea, like merry-christmas mentioned too much like ASP.NET.
I'll do some reading on turbolinks and see if there's something super I'm missing.
Apparently, even though the browser doesn't re-download the assets, it does re-parse and re-execute all of it. Which makes sense. This is where Turbolinks adds the speedup.