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Comment by ericmsimons | Hacker News Reader

Creator here — thanks for posting our project! For more info, check out my Medium announcement post here: https://medium.com/@ericsimons/stackblitz-online-vs-code-ide... :)

Happy to answer any q's & would love to hear your feedback!

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Is it actually a modified version of VScode (As sourcegraph does) or are you just using the Monaco editor? As some mentioned in other comments i would also be insterested in running vscode frontend in the browser while havinf the backend in a VPS. Thanks and congrats on the project it's great!

Yes, that's one use case (desktop/web interop) where using something Electron.JS might actually make sense (to the extreme detriment of battery life, memory usage, and CPU usage).

I want to ask 3 things:

1) Man hours taken in this project

2) Your intended goal

3) Possible avenues to make money.

Sorry for posting two comments. Could you please explain what is the difference between your project and this: https://github.com/CompuIves/codesandbox-client

And this is the online editor: https://codesandbox.io/s/new

From the start, our goal was to port VS Code, NPM, and Webpack loaders to run entirely in your browser and still work offline. With StackBlitz, the browser is installing, bundling, and serving everything — our servers don’t do any of that.

While CodeSandbox is a nice playground for React apps specifically, we have never intended (nor have any aspiration) to compete in the online playground space. We’re attempting to build the first fully in-browser IDE.

Right. Well, from what I can see, even the elements on the page and the offline editor works exactly same as your project. Almost everything, even the `npm install` thing is the same.

All in all, what you have done is great and absolutely useful for quick tests.

...CodeSandbox has no offline support whatsoever.

It sounds like your motivation is to promote an unrelated product in this HN thread, and that's super lame :(

I think they simply didn't understand the distinction that one runs js bins (npm install, webpack build) on a server, and the other in the browser.

They also might not understand why it matters.

Care to explain further?

There's already Atom In Space but it's not complete I don't think. Not sure how hard/reliable it would be to run.

CodeSandbox does almost everything in the browser however. The only thing it doesn't do in the browser is dependency bundling, which StackBlitz does in this case.

Essentially CodeSandbox can work offline if you already had the website open while you're online, then you can still continue offline. StackBlitz has the advantage that the tab where your application is can also be opened initially offline, which is handy for showing your application when you have no connection, but if I'm not wrong you cannot continue developing offline. I'd love to hear that I'm wrong, I'm really impressed with StackBlitz.

I'm the author of CodeSandbox btw :).

> but if I'm not wrong you cannot continue developing offline

Completely false, see -> https://twitter.com/ericsimons40/status/893238309085822977

You even responded to that thread yesterday, not sure how you didn't see this...

I did see that tweet. Maybe I was a bit unclear. I mean that the whole editor itself doesn't open when you don't have a connection (at least for me). My reproduction steps are:

1. Open https://stackblitz.com/fork/react

2. Disconnect from internet

3. Refresh the tab

At least for me this gives me a 404. I'm on Chrome. However, when I open the preview tab while offline it doesn't 404 on me.

Sorry I didn't mean to. I was curious and asked some questions because both projects looks very very close to each other.

I just tested the offline support of CodeSandbox and I did manage to work with the editor (the same functionality you've mentioned in the blog post) when the network is offline. You can't test it here: https://codesandbox.io/s/new

Again, what you did is absolutely perfect and I don't want or mean to underestimate your work! :)

You're telling me that CSB hosts a live dev server inside of a service worker that works across browser tabs? That's patently false. This is ours in action, for reference (was even included in the blog post) -> https://twitter.com/ericsimons40/status/893238309085822977

If you're genuinely just confused about how this stuff works, please _ask questions_ instead of making random assertions. Otherwise people get the impression you're shilling a separate product.

As I already said in another comment, Sass support would be a huge deal for me and our team. Without it, it's not that viable for us to use since we write all our styling in scss. But it's still very nice and I would certainly use it for small projects or some fast hackups.

A minor thing which struck me when reading the Medium post.

When early on, the Angular folks were energetically arguing that the reason you could count on Angular 1, was because they were building on a new technology no-one had ever used before (!), and they were backed by Google (!), my thought was: you've just told me a great deal, but it's likely not what you had in mind.

> we <LOVE> Microsoft!

I had the same thought reading this.

EDIT: Fyi, esft.com, linked from your twitter, is currently 502.

Thanks for pushing the limit of browser. I made a customer npm package that wraps react-16.0.0-beta.3 and it runs well in both RunKit and StackBlitz.

https://twitter.com/ontouchstart/status/893886659070230529

I am sure it will be a great tool for npm package authors to test new server and browser ideas.

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