Yeah I agree Dark should definitely run apps by default. And just to be clear I'm guessing that currently vendor lock-in is probably mostly a concern for folks who already know how to code, who wouldn't necessarily use it anyway if that specific blocker were removed. E.g. since I'm already a full stack developer, the things I'd be looking at are more like whether it would make hiring easier rather than whether it would be better than hiring a dev shop to build an MVP.

I guess another option would be having Dark function more as an app-store-like intermediary between the hardware and software. E.g. telling users they need X, Y, and Z infrastructure and letting them deploy it to whatever cloud they wanted, and having dark just charge for orchestrating that and for providing whatever other services.

In terms of a community, I guess I meant more in terms of getting developers to create libraries for data processing, in terms of things like HTML parsers for scraping webpages and other stuff that is essential for choosing a language but where it's hard to see how it would be viable for one company to build out all that stuff. Unless the plan is just to let folks run code in other languages.