I like the general idea of this.<p>Considering how much of a resource hog modern C++ compiler is for example (I hear good things about Scala as well) it would be nice if I could use a lightweight low powered front end machine to edit code and then have the backend bother with parsing, compiling, etc. People do this already with distributed builds so why not make it baked into IDE with code analysis as well. Maybe the OS can even save memory if you run multiple instances on stuff like executables, etc.<p>What I really don&#x27;t like is how developers are pretending that HTML is the only client side technology if you go client-&gt;server route. To me architecting this as a HTML app shows 0 benefits - the install time is irrelevant - I am a developer - I know how to install applications and I do this for all my other IDEs, the time it takes me to install a thin client is irrelevant.<p>All this &quot;use JS&#x2F;DOM as front end&quot; does is either :<p>compile to JS -&gt; introduce an extra compile step, a shitty VM emulation, worries with interop and leaky abstractions<p>use JS -&gt; poor semantics<p>and both are abusing a layout model made for documents into application development model that gets really inefficient at rendering.<p>IDEs are at the top of GUI complexity - why make shit even more complicated by doing things that slow development down - if they would for example write the frontend in something like JavaFX (not having used JavaFX I&#x27;m only speculating here, but I heard good things) it would probably be equally good (if not better) and at the same time it would make development a lot simpler.