codesandbox-client VS gitpod

Sync your projects effortlessly with GitHub. Codesandbox

Use online code editors such as Codesandbox or Stackblitz. They let you focus on writing code rather than dealing with local environment complexities.

Create a CodeSandbox;

Alternative: CodePen, CodeSandbox. But in the end, we don't need StackOverflow or any alternative at all to use our brains and analyze the situation. (Further reading: Beyond Googling the Error Message

For this tutorial, we will be using code sandbox as our cloud IDE.

At first I was thinking about how to create a package manager website for a custom programming language, looking at crates.io and npmjs.com. But then you also want to have a "try" feature, if this package manager is for a language, so then it's like "code sandboxes" like play.rust-lang.org and the robust codesandbox.io for JS/TS.

https://codesandbox.io/ (Free IDE)

For a few years I have been aware of on-line development environments such as JSBin, JSFiddle and CodePen. They have spearheaded on-line development and more recently a new breed of on-line resources have become available including CodeSandbox, Stackblitz and Replit. You can even access your GitHub repos directly through an in-browser (web) version of MS Visual Studio Code by pressing the full-stop (try it in one of your own repos). Of course there are also cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. but they require a little more configuration and setup than I was happy to incur. Finally, there are two relatively new offerings in this space in the form of GitPod and GitHub Codespaces. I have signed up but not yet explored what they have to offer.

GitPod — Instant, ready-to-code dev environments for GitHub projects. The free tier includes 50 hours/month.

Benefit from an integrated terminal, collaboration features, diffs, and more. Gitpod

Gitpod

Tool Spotlight: Featuring insights on how Artillery and Gitpod can enhance and streamline the benchmarking process.

Before we begin the siege of the RPC we need to ensure our system is configured for building Soroban smart contracts. You have two clear options. The first is to use a virtual environment like Gitpod or Codespaces which can have everything pre-installed and configured for you. In fact here's a good hello-world Gitpod VM we've built for you.

GitPod can integrate with a range of Git repo hosts and supports a number of popular IDEs, not just VS Code. The Starter account gives you 50 hrs free per month.

Worst case there are services like GitPod or GitHub CodeSpaces which offer you a development ready container where you can write and execute your code. You could also just run a Python 3.11/12 container on your machine and use VSCode's Container Plugin to develop in that locally.

https://gitpod.io/ ain't bad either. It gives you per-repo docker environments that include vscode in the browser.

Some of you may know that Gitpod supported a self-hosted installation until December 2022 when it was abandoned. I was part of the self-hosted team until I was laid off in January.