Comment by alabhyajindal
9 hours ago
Very very cool! Just signed up. Reminds me of Val Town which I'm a big fan of. Did you choose Lua because you love using it, or for some other pragmatic reasons?
Do you think a service like yours with support for many variety of languages a good idea? Not in order to meet user demand but purely because I think it would "just" require running the program on the server using a different interpreter/compiler, assuming code sandboxing has been achieved to make the initial language work.
For example, I love the long list of languages supported by Code Golf: https://code.golf/wiki.
Thanks!
> Did you choose Lua because you love using it, or for some other pragmatic reasons?
A bit of both, though I'm literally drinking out of a coffee mug with the Lua logo on it that was given to me after playing a big part in making Lua a thing at a prevoius job. That might speak to my love of Lua.
> Do you think a service like yours with support for many variety of languages a good idea?
From a technical perspective, it would be relatively easy to add support for other languages, the biggest problem would be UI and documentation complexity. Each added language would either require a completely seperate set of documentaion or would require the docs to describe everything one layer of abstraction removed from the code people would actually be writing. Both of which would be less than ideal for my goal of extreme simplicity.
I think it can be a good idea, but to support something like that _well_ would require a pretty large team of people.
I do plan to support some level of 'other languages' for libraries, at a minimum some subset of native Lua libraries (ie. libs written in C). That means it would be possible to find a way to use pretty much any other language interpreter. However, I'm not sure that will ever be a top level feature, there'll probably always be some level of Lua glue code holding everything together.
Even better it could just support WASM and be language agnostic.
It's actually already using wasmtime as one layer in its sandbox. I just think that trying to support other languages, especially in a fully language agnostic way, would make things like documentation far more complex than I could handle and make the service complex enough that the only people who could understand it would be the type of person who don't really need a service like this in the first place.