Sure darklang improves productivity. But the cost of that productivity is absolute vendor lock-in...

Darklang is a proprietary framework where the ENTIRE stack... even the IDE! is controlled by a specific company. Just be weary of this, when depending on it.

That's very true, but for me that's an acceptable tradeoff for not having to write much code or spin up a database, docker container, load balancer, or worry about security. Dark is great for getting a project off the ground and getting to the "proof of concept" stage: for me, there is tremendous value in getting there sooner rather than wasting a bunch of time doing things that are tangential to creating the product.

True, it's great for prototypes, but remember that their incentive is for you to remain on the platform as your project gets bigger.

Therefore you're likely to have extreme difficulty in moving off the platform as your system grows. Which means either a complete rebuild off the platform, or the easier option... Stay on the platform.

So the ultimate options are; either choose open-source flexible solutions, or remain shackled to the proprietary platforms...

That's an interesting point-of-view. I was also worried and had to search in their Slack channel. This is what they have to say:

"so specifically to lock-in: right now, no one concerned about lock-in is going to have a good experience on dark. We don’t have the resources to address that need, but at some point we will be in a company position to deal with the lock-in question. Our plan is to give you tools and resources to move off Dark if you want to"

in b4 all of HN crying posts about dead propriatory software and blogs of how to hack and partially import stuff to "new replacement startup" that is also locked in. When will people finally learn that locked in languages are a very costly mistake.

+1 for Dark — I've been helping a friend with a side project whose backend is built on Dark, and it's very impressive. The request replay feature (being able to replay a previous HTTP request to an endpoint) and seeing step-by-step execution results is amazing.

I've been a Dark beta user since last year and have built several small side projects on it. I think it's fantastic. But I'd describe it as "just code" and not "low code".

To make it work, you have to write all the code! However, you _don't_ have to worry about provisioning databases, deploying, etc, etc, etc.

Makes it really satisfying as a learning to build something and have it be live without getting stuck in heroku / mongodb / etc hell.

Really interested in what the cost is going to be out of beta.

They said the price will be by cpu/db usage and will have a free tier.

Agreed! Dark has been great to build on and powers all of my side projects.