Show HN: My startup, Compilr, an online IDE & compiler. Has over 30,000 users | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My startup, Compilr, an online IDE & compiler. Has over 30,000 users

compilr.com

24 pointsphankinson36 comments

Random suggestion: I think it would be awesome if your landing page let me write code.. Knowing how it 'feels' to write (and run!) a Hello World without registering, etc. would be awesome. Kinda like the MongoDB shell that's on their website. Love that thing.

This is another great idea. It would be cool to create a sort of paste bin like ideone.

I'm trying to figure out the advantages of this over a regular IDE, etc. Simply the fact that it's all on the cloud? What problem are you trying to solve? (I don't mean to sound interrogative, I'm just genuinely curious about your motivation behind this). It certainly looks neat and will check it out for myself.

I think there are some interesting upsides.. I already really love collaborating with GitHub.. the opportunity to take things a step further, pair-program remotely, or fix a unit test from a computer not running a full development environment might be pretty cool.

That is true. I know someone else brought up integration with version control systems (Edit: I see from the blog it's something they're working towards). Furthermore, I'm curious if it allows for offline work on the code as well (if you're going to be riding a train, and you want to download the latest version, edit it, and then reupload). Though I guess with the increasing availability of internet access everywhere this might become less of an issue.

We do have a feature that allows you to Import and Export from the IDE. So before you get on the train just export and once you have internet access just import.

There are advantages to an online IDE. Being able to code from any computer or mobile device without synchronizing your code is a nice one. No hardware issues, like coding for a Windows system on a Mac and vice versa. At some point we'd like to integrate the ability to actually code for mobile devices, for example coding an iPhone application all from your Windows computer.

I'm not exactly a programmer (I've written some really cool Matlab code and I make SAS do nifty things, but no real languages other than dabbling in java) and getting the environment set up is a big intimidator to trying a new language (it took me 20 hours to get AS3 to compile and I never got box2d to work). I'm now tempted to try at least one or two on compilr.

Awesome give us a shot!

Great site, though things are running a little sluggish for me. The homepage took a good ~30 second to load for me.

It's running a little slow here too. It might actually be the amount of traffic hitting our website right now.

Google should buy these guys and integrate their stuff into google docs.

That sounds like a good plan. I hope Google is reading this :)

I think this has a ton of potential. Coding is one of the few things now that I don't do directly in the cloud, and keeping my various systems' development environments up to date is something I'd rather not deal with.

Something that'd make this perhaps awesome would be the ability to invite people to your editing session and collaboratively edit and debug code with them. My ideal IDE would be one where code is stored in an abstract syntax tree format internally rather than files, and I could define my rules for how I like code formatted independently of other people who want to work on my code. Also, have you looked at the Bespin/Skywriter editor?

Team collaboration is one major feature we are looking into adding. It could be setup two different ways depending on how the team would like to function. But essentially everyone could have their own codebase, or there could be one source code that everyone works from.

I haven't check out Bespin yet, but will do now.

The design for syntax highlighting is pretty clever, and makes that feature much more responsive than most in-browser editors. The current line is always black text on a light blue background... and then when you move the cursor to a new line, the highlighting is processed.

I've implemented that kind of thing in the past, and making it perform well is always a ton of work. This approach is much more elegant and gets you 90% of the value. I like it!

Glad you like it. I'd personally like to add personalizition to the IDE so you can customize the colors and editor however pleases you.

About 2 years ago, we launched Compilr.com on Reddit. Compilr is an online IDE and compiler for languages like Java, C#, and VB. Today, we are working hard on Compilr and are really happy about its recent growth.

In just the last year we have grown the traffic about 400%. The userbase has grown from 3,000 at the beginning of 2010 to 32,000 users. We expect our userbase will be well over 100,000 by the end of this year.

Congratulations. As a developer, I am still a bit skeptical about writing codes online. Still I will take a look. Again, congratulations.

Oh btw, have you ever written about your experience (lessons learned) from launching with sites like Reddit?

Thanks

Thanks for your comments! I understand you can be a bit skeptical about writing code online, we try to take every measure to keep your code secure.

Launching with Reddit seemed like a great fit. They have a large community of programmers. We created some buzz and generated a lot of feedback. The initial feedback received from them was what shaped our product into what it is today.

How many of your users are actively using the site?

We'd rather not disclose our specifics at this time.

I was looking through the public projects and think a language filter would be great. Currently it just shows pages and pages of projects that I'd have to navigate.

I think it could be a nice and different way to learn new code instead of using github or other sources to look through code.

That is a great idea. Eventually we'd like to have a keyword search...

So far (a) it's super buggy (e.g. clicking on one of "my projects" sent me to someone else's project of the same name). (b) it's very slow (it took something like a minute just to get the IDE running). (c) with a PHP project at least I have no earthly idea how to actually see it running.

This issues may have been from some caching that was enabled. We have since disabled it. Try clearing your cookies and refresh.

Is there any way that the code can be run? If I write some php code can I run it somewhere? This is only a text editor with highlighting? It would be cool if it had everything related to a project, running, debugging etc not only a plain editor :(

At the moment PHP, C++ and Ruby can not be compiled or executed. All three require a substantial backend, but we are working on it.

I can see myself using such a web based IDE. However, I dont know what I'm buying at compilr. There is no demo of the product. How it works? a video presentation or screenshot presentation is needed on home page.

You can create an account for free and give it a shot. In the future we will add a video and a features overview list.

Why is there no FAQ / Help page. I was looking around to figure if the site helps to run / debug as well. After 10 minutes of searching, i was still not able to locate this information.

I was hoping to have some video tutorials built beforehand, we have just been swamped. But there definitely needs to be a help page for users.

Does it have source control integration? I've got to believe it does, otherwise you would not have so many users, but I found no info about it...

Not at this time. This is top priority in 2011.

Any plans for python support?

Yes, we'd like to add this in the future. We have had a number of requests for it.

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