Simon -- since you're the cocreator of Django, you might get a kick out of this: From loading up a Django environment to adding and rendering the first view takes less than a minute: https://gifs.amasad.repl.co/django.gif
Before starting this company I was a founding engineer on the React Native team where I focused speed of setting up and taking the drudgery out of cross-platform mobile dev. And before that I was a founding engineer at Codecademy where we were attacking the same problem from an education angle.
With Repl.it, however, we're determined to simultaneously solve the "getting started" problem while scaling the environment to allow real work. It's incredibly challenging but we've made great progress. If anyone is interested in working with us, collaborating, or if you're simply passionate about this problem and want to chat then I'd love to hear from you: [email protected]
Certainly the plan. Just a matter of priorities and time. I'm curious, what's so attractive about self hosted version?
In fact, I think that's a valid answer to the question posed by the headline. Returning the power to the end user, and keeping it there, should be the most important priority for software developers. This is a social problem, not an engineering problem, but unlike many other social problems the solution will have to be engineering-driven.
In more concrete terms, that means being able to self-host your tools.
I heartily agree. There are so many new tools and things that are interesting concepts, that I don't try because there is no offline/self-hosted version available.
Current example (but can be replaced by a myriad of other tools, this is not specific to 'em): Notion. Apparently could be adopted into my personal knowledge management, has some interesting features most of the software I've seen so far does not, but why would I ever invest even a moment of time to pay the costs of using the system (let alone the membership fees etc.) if one day, poof, it's gone, like Frank Sinatra, like WiiWare, like Microsoft eBooks, like Google Reader.
> Returning the power to the end user, and keeping it there, should be the most important priority for software developers.
This is what we need to return to. Look at the open-source manifestos, FSF documents, heck even certain sections in the Windows 9x User interface guides and .NET Framework design guidelines indicate that the user should always be the focus, the user should be the one in control.
Though I'm glad for the flexibility it will offer you...that doesn't seem like an awesome idea/trend.
I'll take a deeper look.
Check out our community as well, lots of hackers, especially young ones, sharing and collaborating on code: https://repl.it/talk
You could trivially create a new environment to test out someones PR or work on a feature branch, etc. If you use hosted environments, then you could connect from any client. If you only have a web browser, then you could work from VSCode in the browser (it's all JS+HTML anyway).
Others could join your hosted environment for peer-programming Google Docs style.
On hosted environments, normally long builds could be done very quickly and smart caching on the backend could share incremental compilation state between your teammates and you.
We're pretty close to this already with VSCode Remote Containers[0], Visual Studio Online[1] and VSCode Live Share[2].
(Disclosure: I work at MSFT but not on these technologies.)
[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers
We tried to make it as seamless and as low configuration as possible. Our "run on repl.it" badge is currently growing exponentially on GitHub.
And the goal is to get to open-source most, if not all of it.
Is GitPod fully open-source? AFAICT you still need to buy a license to self-host.
I like docker, but it's too resource heavy on a Mac. I need it running directly and not in a VM.
So a simple nix file, and nix-shell shebangs[1] has been life changing. Throw in --pure and now you really know the environment works everywhere.
My repos all have a shell.nix with every dependency. Just call nix-shell and it works in Linux and OSX. Anywhere.
You can even bundle it into a docker image and use nix in there too. For production, etc.
Documentation and tutorials are lacking, but if you put in some time, I've found nothing comparable.
Version it in, pin the Nix channel[2], and you can come back a year later in a brand new machine and start where you left off.
[1] https://gist.github.com/travisbhartwell/f972aab227306edfcfea
[2] Highly counterintuitive: if you don't pin a Nix channel, it's a moving target and dependencies may go missing, be updated, etc.
It’s pretty difficult to understand and use though.
But once you do, you can build abstractions to improve that UX. But it would be nice if vanilla Nix was easier.
I was impressed by the low latency (at least as of a few months ago). If you make a web app right, it can be faster than a resource-hogging local IDE!
I don't use it myself every day because I've already been using vim/screen/bash for 15+ years. Those are my lightweight REPLs.
But if I were advising someone to code, and they wanted to skip the dev env, I would probably try repl.it. They also have impressive concurrent editing facilities in any language.
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I also think the question is malformed, because I would hesitate to say there's any "single problem" in software development. It's all death by a thousand paper cuts.
The "dev env" problem is real, but it's really a problem with 100+ different tools. It's an architecture/ecosystem problem.
repl.it has some creative solutions to these problems, though it's still a ton of work. I think they are doing great but it's not going to solve all problems.
For example, another popular dev env is for data science or machine learning researchers. RStudio is doing some good stuff there, and there's Google colab, etc.
Software development is very big diverse and it's hard to imagine one solution cutting across all of it.
With the Universal Package Manager (https://github.com/replit/upm) we're trying to encode the best practices in package management behind a single easy-to-use interface. One of the most fun features is that you can `import` or `require` a package and we'll just guess what you want to do, install the dependencies for you, generate a spec and lock file.
With prybar (https://github.com/replit/prybar) we're trying to create a universal interactive programming experience that behaves roughly the same for every language.
And, to be open-sourced soon, our window-tiling manager and workspace (https://repl.it/blog/ide), we're trying to build a framework that makes it so easy to build complex, plugin-based environments, such as IDEs, very easy to build.
We also leverage a lot of awesome open-source projects and standards, like the Language Server Protocol by VSCode/Microsoft, that abstract over language features and makes it easy to provide an amazing experience across languages.
Edit: if it's been a few months since you tried Repl.it, give it another try, we've made a lot of progress since then. Multiplayer is now out of beta, we have Git integration, and we've done a lot to make it faster and more reliable.
In a nutshell: your repo contains a file (or directory) with everything needed to set up a containerized run environment for the project. VSCode adds its own server daemon, and your IDE runs half inside the container, half on the host machine. Once it's set up, everyone on the project (who has vscode) instantly has a one click clean, working development environment, including all the niceness you expect from local development (debugger, test integration, etc). It is fucking magical.
Detail: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/VisualStudioCodeRemoteDevelop...
If you get a chance, Hyperkit can be fun to play with. I was able to write a bash script that downloads Hyperkit andba Debian ISO, and from that boot a running instance of Debian. It was an interesting exercise.
1) install windows 10 2) install visual studio
And I’m good to go. I’ve seen my friends from the uni setting up elaborate arch/vim contraptions and I’m kinda glad I don’t have to.
npm & git's local directory awareness is a lifesver
rvm / nvm are great when the shell integration is turned on, direnv is wonderful
gap seems to be with native packages -- there isn't one of these for brew / apt-get, and language-level package managers fail on these deps a lot
inability to map local hostnames to docker is also a problem -- that would make it easier to manage multiple environments at once
Codesandbox had better UX than Glitch, at least for my taste.
pacman -S qtcreator clang qt5 cmake ninja git hotspot heaptrack
Every time I talk to someone who's learning to program I tell them: "Setting up your development environment will be a nightmare. I have been doing this for twenty years and it's STILL a nightmare for me every time I do it. You are not alone."
Docker is reasonably good here... except you have to install Docker, and learn to use Docker Compose, and learn enough of the abstractions that you can fix it when something breaks.
https://glitch.com/ is by far the best step forward I've seen on this problem, but it's relatively limited in terms of what you can accomplish with it.