Minimalist web application deployment with Scheme

The web is the most accessible platform for reaching the largest amount of users. However, modern web development toolchains based on NodeJS and emscripten are anything but minimal. Can we simplify things? In this talk, we'll take a look at using a minimalistic toolchain written in Guile Scheme instead.

Guile has a good bootstrapping story, few dependencies, and wide availability in Linux distributions. Guile has been usable for web server backends for years but is becoming a great choice for the frontend, too. Hoot, developed by the Spritely Institute, is a self-contained WebAssembly toolchain and an implementation of Guile that compiles to WebAssembly. Together, Guile and Hoot cut the gordian knot of NodeJS and emscripten.