Wed, Mar 9, 2022Betting on CodeMirror
At Replit, our mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. In order to achieve that ambitious goal, we need to make sure that the experience of writing, running, and sharing code is as seamless as possible. At the heart of that experience is the editor itself. As a result, we dedicate a huge amount of time and energy to improving the stability, performance, and accessibility of our editor. Monaco For years, we had been relying on Monaco to power that experience. Monaco is the open source editor behind VS Code, written and maintained by Microsoft. At the time, the decision to adopt Monaco was an easy one. It was packed full of useful features that helped users navigate and write code quicker, had built in support for a large number of popular languages, and looked familiar to those coming from VS Code and other popular IDEs. These reasons, along with its growing open source community, quickly made Monaco the de-facto way to write code on the web.
Tue, Mar 8, 2022Hack Week 2022 Recap
Hey, everyone! I’m sure you all heard about the infamous, annual Replit Hack Week, but what exactly is it? Every year, we come together as a team to brainstorm, hack, and push the limits of our platform to set the tone for the year. During the first Hack Week last year, our team integrated Nix into Replit which transformed how we do infrastructure, packages, and languages. Nix also allows users to configure Replit to suit their needs. In line with our purpose for Hack Week ‘22, the theme for the year is “Community and Extensibility”.
Sun, Feb 27, 2022Kaboom Draw
Programming is hard, especially for beginners where the code <-> output feedback loop is cumbersome. People need to click run button, see output, change code, click run again see output. There are a lot of ideas that greatly improved this experience like live-reloading (a lot in the audio / visual context, and UI dev). However the most exciting idea I've seen is still the experiments done by Bret Victor, like in Learnable Programming. Seeing his experiements on combining live reload + sensible controls still takes my breath every time. You might know we're on the way of adopting Codemirror 6 to replace Monaco for a more extensible and maintainable editor (shoutout to Sergei for carrying us through this hard time!). One day I saw Faris made a css color picker codemirror 6 extension and it got me thinking, hmm CM6's extension system is really handy, what if we make some more sensible controls over all kinds of values, and make something like the Bret Victor experiments? Excited by the idea, I decided to do shove off some non-urgent tasks and do a little hack week on my own to jam out these thoughts. But first, gotta book a slot on the demo calendar: excited to excite Barron
Wed, Feb 23, 2022All New Repls are Powered By Nix
For the past year we have been working hard to integrate Nix into our platform and rebuild our existing language experiences with package from Nix. We are excited to announce that all new repls are now powered by Nix. In this post we'll talk about what this means for the future of the platform and all the work that it took to get here. With Nix you can easily create templates for languages Replit didn't support before, pull in more development tools than ever, and access any cli application in the shell without installing anything: Every new repl being powered by Nix means that we've be able to make vast improvements to our existing languages: Long awaited Node.js v16 support 100x faster Python package management
Thu, Feb 17, 2022Getting Started with Solidity on Replit
Have you ever wanted to quickly prototype an idea, reproduce a bug, or share a code demo? Maybe you just got an idea for a new smart contract that allows users to bet on soccer teams, and you want to quickly prototype this and share it with your teammates. In all of these instances, Replit is the perfect solution. Replit is a powerful online integrated developer environment (IDE) with a simple user interface that supports more than fifty programming languages. It also supports real-time collaboration, allowing for use cases like team member onboarding or hands-on learning for students. It integrates seamlessly with GitHub, allowing you to create repositories from a repl or load a repo from GitHub without any manual setup. Replit also gives you the power to share demos through a link that can be accessed by any device, anywhere in the world. In this article you’ll learn how to get started with Solidity on Replit. Solidity is a statically typed, curly-braces programming language designed for developing smart contracts that run on Ethereum. It can also be used by other blockchains for interoperability and easier migration. Getting Started with Solidity on Replit In this section, you’ll learn how to get started with Solidity on Replit and deploy your first smart contract.
Mon, Feb 14, 2022Make a Multiplayer Game with Kaboom.js and Heroic Labs
Many developers are familiar with Replit, the in-browser IDE. However, you may not know that it can be used to make full applications and games. With Kaboom, a JavaScript game-programming library that helps you quickly make fun games, and Nakama, an open source distributed server created by Heroic Labs, you can easily create a multiplayer game that runs on Replit. In this article, you’ll learn how to make a multiplayer game using Kaboom in Replit, utilizing Heroic Labs as the game server. If you want to check out the finished product or just follow along with this tutorial, you can use this REPL. What Are Multiplayer Games Multiplayer games are usually played as matches, where players join a match and compete for high scores or try to defeat each other in a battle royale with other players from all over the world. The action is happening in real time and can be played as a team or individual; Nakama can support both kinds.
Fri, Feb 11, 2022Announcing File Persistence in Hosted Apps… for Everyone!
Replit is your computer — for whatever you need to do. We announced last year that Hackers would be able to have their hosted apps be able to persist file changes since that made it possible to build a lot more apps. But we were not quite satisfied that only Hackers were going to get this new feature. Today we are announcing that we are opening this up for everyone! Why the change? Back in November, we knew that this new feature was going to have a small, but measurable, impact to our infrastructure. This meant that opening this up for everyone from the get-go was not ideal. We wanted to get this out to users as soon as possible, so we decided to be iterative. We crafted a plan to open this up for Hackers first to observe what a realistic load would look like, while pondering some potential optimizations that we could use to improve it. In addition, we added more monitoring just in case anything came up. After enabling this and blogging about it, we saw a very small difference between our predictions and reality. The plan had worked! And our hunch about something unexpected appearing was right on the money: the extra monitoring enabled us to find (and fix) an extremely low-probability bug that could only be observed when operating at Replit scale. With the new data, we could make data-driven decisions. We went through the planned optimizations and the additional load is now in a much better place, so we're comfortable opening this up for everyone.
Fri, Feb 4, 2022Making new Python repls 100x faster to start up
Python is currently the world's (and Replit's) most popular programming language. We've improved the Python experience during last year, with a Python package cache to make installs faster, and an integrated, multiplayer debugger to increase the understanding of what programs do. But there are still a few problems with Python. Packages are often very space-consuming, so they are installed into an ephemeral 2 GiB scratch disk to avoid filling up repl directories. Unfortunately this means that every time a Python repl starts, a lengthy package installation process must happen. This makes some Python repls take forever to start! Some other packages that have a large number of dependencies (like TensorFlow and Torch) were completely unusable because they don't even fit on the scratch directory. We decided to address these shortcomings and make Python a bit faster on top of that! Today, we're releasing a brand new Python template that has a lot of neat things. Newly created Python repls will now be based on nix so that additional programs and libraries can be installed, have a standard virtual environment stored inside the repl, and a brand new caching mechanism so that packages are installed even faster and they don't take up too much space. I had the wildest dream, that I was able to run the TensorFlow 2 quickstart on replit without running out of disk space or memory How does it work? We had a few goals in mind when we started designing this:
Wed, Feb 2, 2022What We Look for When We Interview
We’re on a mission to bring the next billion software creators online. In 2022, to get there, we're focusing on: Making Replit run fast on popular devices across the globe. Helping new coders build and ship for their first time. Reaching those goals requires infrastructure work and real-world experimentation, so we are growing our team!
Mon, Jan 31, 2022Understanding Repl Resource Utilization
Every computer on earth needs these three essential resources in some form: Processor Memory Storage The computers we provide for Replit users, or Repls, have access to a virtual CPU, an allocation of RAM, and a virtualized filesystem. It’s important to understand resource utilization within the context of the software that you’re writing. To this end, we have started rolling out a new component in the file tree to make this more transparent and visible to all of our users.
Fri, Jan 21, 2022Going Where the Next Billion Creators Are
Mobile is the future of computing. But building good software creation tools for mobile devices is hard. Luckily, at Replit, we like to run toward the hard things. This week, we launched a completely rearchitected mobile IDE for web. If you’ve used it before, the new version won’t look much different, but it will likely feel different. Why We Care Mobile devices are the world’s most ubiquitous computers. At Replit, we have kids coding their next big idea on their phone on the way to school, instead of scrolling through social media. We have local communities in developing countries learning & teaching code together on their phones, in order to get hired for jobs. We have colleagues coding prototypes in multiplayer and demoing their work on their phones, while they are on the go. We even noticed users sharing Replit coding tutorials on TikTok: @coding4python3 Antwoorden aan @wewillcum #replit #code #coding #coding4python3 #python ♬ origineel geluid - coding4python3
- Thu, Jan 20, 2022
Getting Started with Rust on Replit
If you’ve been debating which new programming language to learn, Rust is a strong option. According to a recent Stack Overflow developer survey, Rust is: The most loved programming language, according to almost eighty-seven percent of surveyed developers. One of the highest-paid languages, only behind Ruby, Perl, and a pack of ever-lucrative functional languages. The best way to learn Rust, of course, is to start coding. This is where Replit comes in. Replit is a collaborative in-browser integrated development environment (IDE) that supports over fifty programming languages with built-in tooling to write and organize code; manage dependencies; perform version control; and build, run, test, and visualize execution of applications. There are a few reasons to use Replit when learning Rust:
Tue, Jan 18, 2022Use Replit At Work With Teams Pro
For the past 6 months, we have been testing Teams Pro while in private beta. Today, we are excited to release it to the world. Teams Pro is Replit for work. If your company wants to have a collaborative repository for sharing and editing code, create a team now. Here's what some of our users are doing: Host slack bots, cron jobs, web scrapers, scripts, webpages, and more
Tue, Jan 11, 2022Migrating our Web App from Heroku to GCP
After many years of running on Heroku, Replit has fully migrated to Google Cloud Platform. Why leave Heroku in the first place? Heroku served us well, but ultimately we recognized that our mission to bring the next billion software creators online would require an entirely new approach to our infrastructure. Our infrastructure needs to be flexible, and we need to have control across the entire stack - both data and hosting - to make moves to support our mission. So, what did it take to migrate Replit? Step 1: Demo a Prototype We put together a quick demo of the website running in Google Cloud using a test database (with a fake dataset) to prove the concept would work. In this stage, we also gathered feedback and started to push the boundaries to understand where the problems might lurk later in the project. We took some time to investigate alternate hosting systems and even clouds. Ultimately, because the rest of Replit's infrastructure is in Google Cloud, it made the most sense to stay with what we know.
- Thu, Dec 23, 2021
2021 Kajam Winners
Kajam Winners It was a dark room with mystique and seriousness that accompanied the feverous whispers. Seven people stood in the room, held down only by the weight of responsibility they carried with them. One by one they were handed a link to a website- what they would find they did not know. And one by one the links were opened. Colors and music filled the empty air. Excitement gleamed in each of their eyes, their fingers danced across the keyboard, their mouse moved sporadically as though if it stayed still for too long they would surely meet their doom. And yet after another moment, the link was closed, and the display subsided. Each individual scribbled something down, and the cycle repeated four hundred times. After days of deliberation, the people consulted each other and wrote one final list. The list was placed in a red envelope, stamped with a wax seal of the Replit logo. The doors to the darkroom opened, and the individuals left. Leaving the letter behind. Today we will enter that room and open the red envelope, to announce the winners of the 2021 Kajam Game Jam! What was Kajam? Starting October 18th, the Kajam game jam began. On October 25th, Kajam ended. During that time, people rushed to create a game relating to the theme "HUGE". People could interpret that however, they wanted- and we certainly had a lot of unique interpretations. Our seven judges voted on the submissions for each of the seven awards that we had. Most Creative, Best Story, Most Polished, Most Hilarious, Most Theme-fitting, Best Kaboom Game, and of course the grand prize Most Fun. All the categories were worth $1,000, except for the grand prize. The grand prize was worth a whopping $10,000 U.S. dollars.