Can you comment on Iliad's suitability for real-time apps?

I think you should think about it like any Ajax app building framework, just more comfortable to use. I think you can get the same degree of real time as with elixir Phoenix

Phoenix is very fast.

 which I think you linked to, perhaps a bit less performant than erlang for many users, but not what you need for games and simulations with a simulation and rendering loop. Maybe you’d need to replace the current comet implementation to use web sockets instead of long polling. 

Right, polling will not work.  WebSocket is the way to go.   I’ve used the Zinc framework for WS and HTTP.  It works well.  Will Iliad be based on Zinc?  I saw a mention of the Zn* stuff in a recent posting about the upgrade effort to Pharo 8.

If you need something than behaves more like an applet then maybe Craig Latta’s caffeine.js is best for you.

I’m trying to avoid JS and skip directly to Wasm/WASI.  Really.  I want my universal compile target to be Wasm, and I want minimal involvement in JS.  I’m using two JS libs now with Aida because I have too.  I would like to use them also in Iliad, and then port out of JS, as I write my own stuff in Smalltalk and compile to .wat and then .wasm.

I’ve used PharoJS for SPAs.

Can we change/augment Iliad to use Smalltalk in the browser, as the recent PharoJS video shows? 

 It is very fast, loads with little overhead but is very experimental and unstable. I can walk you around the pitfalls but it is not the same dev experience as Iliad

Can you break that down?  What are the problems?  The demo in the video I posted recently seemed very interesting if one’s aim is to code and debug the entire web app in Smalltalk.

or any other smalltalk. Amber is also fast and stable but also lacks the full pharo dev experience. 

I could never accomplish much with Amber, but really wanted it to work.  Even more so now, I’m trying to distance myself from all things JS.  I’ll use the JS glue for Wasm-based apps, because I have no choice currently, but that’s as far as I want to go with it.  I prefer to focus on Wasm, WebGL2, and WebGPU when ready.  WebGPU works for native apps too:  http://kvark.github.io/web/gpu/native/2020/05/03/point-of-webgpu-native.html.

Shaping