Show HN: Program Explorer, a container playground

(programexplorer.org)

62 points | by aconz2 17 hours ago ago

9 comments

  • mattgodbolt 9 hours ago ago

    Congrats! It's amazing to see what CE has inspired! Thanks for the shout out :)

  • simpaticoder 13 hours ago ago

    Congrats on a launch, sounds like your implementation is quite thoughtful. In fact limiting to only shell helps focus on what you're giving - 1 second of compute with 1GB of RAM, for free. Who knows what scripts people will try? I think sharing those scripts would be interesting. In that vein, sharing from you to your users, consider providing some example scripts that demonstrate the fiddly differences between base images.

    • aconz2 12 hours ago ago

      Thank you! I'm also excited at the possibilities and today you can share "long links" (with all the data embedded in the URL's fragment) but in the future short links with storage on the server or loading from a gist for example would be another cool feature. And having a variety of interesting examples ready to go like you mention would be nice too. There's almost too much there that I was worried I would never ship and would still be playing with examples. For fun, here is the most basic version of compiler explorer https://programexplorer.org/#s=eyJjbWQiOiJzaCAvcnVuL3BlL2luc...

  • TkTech 8 hours ago ago

    Neat! One small bug - In dark mode, the text on the banner at the top is unreadable.

  • sys13 16 hours ago ago

    Feedback on the name: I didn't think that it would be about containers. The other platforms you mentioned are more descriptive (jsfiddle, db-fiddle, Go playground, and Rust playground)

    • connormon 16 hours ago ago

      Completely agree. It almost sounds like a website to discover new programs. At the same time, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head that would be a better name.

    • aconz2 16 hours ago ago

      Yeah names are hard and it is just a working name. I'm simultaneously using containers as the distribution and runtime mechanism but also wanted them to be an implementation detail and not the spotlight

  • vivzkestrel 16 hours ago ago

    only supports running shell scripts?

    • aconz2 15 hours ago ago

      You can run any program that is in the container you select. Right now it ignores the entrypoint from the container config (though you could manually copy that into the Cmd field). Shell is a convenient program to run though so you can pass it a script to then run multiple commands. But you can run `date` directly for instance: https://programexplorer.org/#s=eyJjbWQiOiJkYXRlIiwic3RkaW4iO...