Wed, Mar 7, 2018Introducing Node.js package support
Ever since we introduced third-party package support for Python we've seen an explosion of exciting programs on Repl.it. Everything from games to machine-learning applications that just weren't possible before. Today we're happy to announce that we're expanding this to support Node.js. Just require your dependencies and we'll handle the rest for you. Here is a working repl that gets my Github stats. It uses request to fetch the data and underscore to filter the relevant stats. This is an early (open beta) release so please let us know if you hit any bugs or issues. We're currently working on the following: package.json support: if you have a package.json in your project we'll use that instead of parsing the requires. This will likely come in the next couple of days. Caching: if you install a package on a repl it will be cached forever.
- Mon, Feb 26, 2018
New and improved repls page
People use Repl.it in a variety of ways; some use it for building and shipping applications, while others use it for working on homework, and many others use it as a quick prototyping/experimentation tool. Supporting all these use cases (and more) is something we care a lot about, but up until now there wasn't an easy way to, for example, quickly go back to a project that you continue to work on every day. Today we're excited to announce some of the changes that we've been testing for the past couple of weeks. Going to "my repls" the first thing you'll notice is a big "Continue coding" section with the projects that we think you might want to go back and work on. Starring Additionally, you can now star repls, so it's easy to go back to them!
- Wed, Feb 14, 2018
Modular, fast, small: how we built a server-rendered IDE
At Repl.it our mission is to make programming more accessible, which means our coding environment needs to be lightweight, load fast, and work from anywhere in the world. However, as with so many software projects that evolve with time, we accumulated some bloat (luckily, we haven't included a mail client yet) and quite a few ad-hoc hacks to glue everything together. In this post, we'll go over how we designed our new IDE to have a small core (everything is a plugin), to be easily customizable (even on the fly), and to server-render. The old IDE React encourages you to layout and compose your components as they appear on the page. Our workspace started out looking something like this: But this lacks configurability. For every language, we have a slightly different configuration. Some have tabs, console, a web viewer, or language-specific components like python turtle. Additionally, every language has a different engine powering it with its own interface and set of capabilities. All this configuration logic used to get crammed into the top-level component with ever-increasing branching logic. Furthermore, runtime configuration must be explicitly written for every language. Modifying the layout for one language leads to more hardcoded logic and components and single-use components. This, in turn, caused making changes to one component a game of updating and testing every possible parent. Rewrite
- Fri, Jan 26, 2018
Teaching refugees how to code
At Repl.it our mission is to make programming more accessible. We can’t do this alone so it’s great to partner with non-profits and hack clubs that share our mission. Re-coded is one of those non-profits, they're teaching programming in the refugee camps in Iraq and Turkey. Today I’d like to share with you their story of how they found Repl.it useful in overcoming logistical challenges. By: Gabe Jackson At Re:Coded, it’s our goal to provide a world-class education to refugees and displaced persons who would not otherwise have access to such opportunities. In making that goal a reality, we depend on a number of tools in the classroom. One of our favorites is repl.it, an in-browser IDE and REPL that we use for everything from facilitating our selection process to live coding through examples in class to creating personalized homework assignments for students.
- Mon, Jan 22, 2018
Your websites hosted on Repl.it
People in our community build awesome games, apps, and websites on Repl.it's web programming environment, but until now they didn't have any easy way of sharing these creations with other people. But today we're fixing this: every web program you write we will automatically host for you under a subdomain with your name. You're then free to share the website, make it your homepage, submit it as homework, or even build it as your startup company. Here is a quick video of how it works. Notice how fast you can go from a project to a hosted website: Static site hosting is only the start. Pretty soon you'll be able to host all sorts of apps and servers on Repl.it.
- Sun, Nov 12, 2017
New in Repls: autosave, custom urls, and more
We are always excited about launching new features and sharing with you, our dear users, what we’ve been up to. For the past few months, Amjad, Mason and I have been working hard and last night we quietly launched the new repl features. These features required a lot of infrastructure and data changes which is always tricky to execute. We ran into some technical difficulties last night with the data migration but was able to bring the site back up and things have been running relatively smoothly since then. However, since radical changes were required to get this out we’re still working through some of the issues. If you see a bug or if you have a repl that’s not working please let us know and we’ll fix it. We hope we have your support as we work through the issues. One thing we can promise you is that this change will unlock so many amazing features and long-term stability and reliability starting today. Note that the classroom product is not affected by this at all. This is only a “repls” product change. Now on to the new features 🥁🥁 Autosave When we promise we deliver. As of last night your code is autosaved by default. The new interface will include only two buttons: the run and the share button. You don’t need to worry about saving your code anymore, we’ll do it for you, so no code is lost, all your work is saved in (my repls) .
- Thu, Sep 7, 2017
A Few Updates in the Workspace
We strive to make the workspace as useful as possible while keeping it intuitive and approachable. We get a crazy number of requests for features every day, not to mention our own ideas. It becomes a challenging balance between feature creep and simplicity. Lately we've added a few of these features that we hope you'll find useful and, if not, you won't even notice they're there. Formatting in Javascript Javascript is the first language where we've introduced an automatic formatter. If you click the icon we'll run your code through prettier which reprints your code in a consistent style. We've already been using prettier internally since it first came out in and it has been a huge win. We'll be rolling out formatters for other languages in the future. Uploading Files
- Tue, Aug 22, 2017
Two Stories from Our Community
Like any other startup, we go through ups and downs. However, we try to keep a positive energy, and you, my friends, contribute to that by sending your love, support, and thanks everyday. Above all, you inspire us with stories of how our product helped you learn, teach, and even develop a new skill to land a better job. Today I’d like to share with you two stories from two Replers: Ruslan a software developer from Scotland, and Mark a math teacher from Houston. Landing a self-driving job Ruslan (@kuddai), a Physics Major, wanted to land a job in doing software engineering. So he spent a lot of time practicing coding using Repl.it and eventually was able to land a new job software engineering job in the cutting edge field of self-driving! Here is him telling the story: While I was doing my M.S. in Informatics at University of Edinburgh, I realized that I lacked practice in coding interviews because my first major is in Physics. During my preparation (“Cracking coding interview”, “Algorithms by Robert Sedgewick”, hackerrank, etc.) I needed some general place to store my solutions for coding exercises. Eventually, I have chosen repl.it because:
- Tue, Jul 4, 2017
Your Repl.it Profile
We're constantly surprised and delighted by the creativity of people in our community. Whether it be games, animations, utilities, or simply snippets to answer Stackoverflow questions -- it's always fascinating to see! However, we haven't done a good job giving credits to authors for their creations. We're changing this in two ways: We're giving you, dear Repl.it user, your own user profile. Your repls will have your picture and name on the top left hand section above the editor. User profiles Right now, you can go to your account and start crafting your user profile. You can change your profile picture (it defaults to your Gravatar if you have one), add a bio (complete with links to your website or social media accounts), and if you want, even add a school, company, organization or whatever institution you belong to.
- Thu, Jun 1, 2017
One more console
Debugging web projects on Repl.it can be frustrating. Until today, there was no easy way to view your errors and console logs (unless you open your browsers' developer tools). But that's changing because we're introducing our new tabbed console view for environments that has graphics output (like Web and Python Turtle). See it in action:
- Mon, May 29, 2017
Check out my Repl!
The label "sessions" is very near and dear to my heart. I vividly remember how Amjad came up with the name and why. After we learned that people would like to create accounts on Repl.it, we were trying to figure out what was the main value proposition for creating an account. Of course, it was saving code! But what do you call a list of code projects saved on your account? In a brainstorming session in the New York City subway (incidentally, on our way to an improv class so naturally we were yes-anding each-other) Amjad suggested the name "sessions"! He continued "this will be a feed of sesssions that you create and manage". But let's be honest "sessions" is kind of boring and somewhat bland. So if Repl-it is about Repl-ing, what is the thing that you save? It's of course a Repl! In fact, some of our users already call it that: "I made a repl". So going forward we're going to use "Repl" instead of "Session". When you log in you'll see that the "sessions" list is now a "Repls" list. And an individual "session" is a "Repl". Not much else will change. But you'll be happy to know that we're designing a place where you can showcase your Repls and share them with the rest of our community. Happy Repling!!
- Wed, May 17, 2017
Introducing Kotlin REPL
On the heels of Google announcing native Kotlin support on Android yesterday, we thought it'd be cool to get a Kotlin REPL up so that people can try it. Give it a spin here. It's still in beta so let us know if you hit any bugs.
- Tue, Mar 28, 2017
Require any npm package
Last year we introduced support for importing any Python package from PyPi and -- although we don't have perfect support for all packages -- it turned out to be a very popular feature. That's why today we're excited to continue the roll-out for the rest of our platform starting with web-based languages. [](preview end) Whether you're using plain old JavaScript REPL, HTML/CSS/JS, or ES2016, you'll be able to import any package from npm (that can run in the browser). How it works is that we parse out the requires from your code, fetch the bundle from npm via wzrd.in, and evaluate the bundle in the same context as your code. Note that ES6 imports is not currently supported but we're hoping to get it in soon.
- Mon, Mar 27, 2017
Building Towards a Holistic Development Service
Software development is one of the first -- if not the first -- examples of what J. C. Licklider called the Man-Computer Symbiosis. A "cooperative interaction" between people and computers where the person is concerned in what may be classified as the creative aspect of the work such as setting the goals, formulating the hypothesis and evaluating the results while the computer does all the "routinizable work". This symbiotic partnership is especially effective for work that puts to the test our intellectual capacity like keeping all the moving parts of a large software system in our head. Or as Dijkstra warns us "the competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull". This begins to explain why software engineers are so passionate about their tools. From the good old editor wars to JavaScript fatigue, we're continuously adding and improving on our arsenal because this is the best way we know how to become better engineers. From a business point-of-view, it might also explain the seemingly sudden rise and growth of the developer tools market: hosted version control, infrastructure, devops and automation etc. Despite all this success I think we've fallen victim to the onetime useful Unix dictum Do One Thing and Do it Well. Roughly speaking, we separate our tools by development life-cycle stages: authoring, executing, testing, building, and deployment. Which limits how much information each tool has at its disposal and therefore how much utility it can provide. Sharing the work isn't easy. The text stream as the "universal interface" means that, for example, tools need to re-parse code at every stage of the life-cycle to extract whatever meaningful information it needs. In practice it means I can't upgrade to the latest release of my favorite programming language because I need to wait on all my tools to upgrade their parsers. And this is not a theoretic problem, consider the fact that the website that you're probably reading this on was authored in ES2016 JavaScript, parsed and compiled to ES5 and then parsed again and minified and then parsed yet again to finally run in your browser which most likely runs ES2016 (back full-circle). However, we'd like to take a stab at the problem from an angle that we, at Replit, are uniquely situated to do. Our mission is to make programming more accessible, so when we design we focus on the hobbyist and the learner (although a lot of engineers also get a lot of value from our service). This relieves us from the pressure of having to build tools that needs to compete and achieve parity with existing development tools. Our users are open to things that makes it easier for them to learn, play, and share.
- Thu, Mar 2, 2017
Start Coding with Clojure on Replit
Earlier this week we introduced Haskell support. And now, as promised, we're continuing to add more functional languages. So today we're excited to introduce Clojure. A Lisp dialect that runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine with a focus on immutability. [](preview end) You can give it a try right now at repl.it/languages/clojure. And as always here's a gif of what you can expect: This is built on top of the Clojure's NRepl server so you should be able to get the native behavior you expect from a Clojure REPL. Please let us know if we can make it better.