GitHub Codespaces Lets You Code in Your Browser Without Any Setup (thenextweb.com) 63
GitHub has launched Codespaces -- a feature that lets you code directly on the web. Think of this as a virtual Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on the cloud. From a report: Earlier, to contribute to a project you would need to make a pull request, and set up the environment on your local machine according to the requirements of a project. With Codespaces, you don't need to do that anymore. As soon as you click on the code button, the website sets up the environment in seconds.
But I need good source control (Score:1)
There isn't really anything too technically impressive of being able to code in your browser, or have most modern IDE be browser based. However it comes down to the question, on how far do you want to go on the cloud until you need to run stuff locally.
I am not Anti-Cloud, but it should be used as an option in your toolkit. Today's computers have more than enough power to handle most of your code, without having to pay for hosting fees and usage.
Re:But I need good source control (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would you bother buying a computer?
You probably lease your phone anyway. Eventually, they just won't sell your phone to you, but only a lease, and you'll pay for compute time for everything.
Everything old is new again. Enjoy your dumb terminals.
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Enjoy owning nothing. Even what you produce since you don't know where it is stored and what kind of licensing you gave to the guys hosting it.
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Why license it? The hosting companies are making money by analyzing your code and using it themselves. So much free labor!
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It's amazing. I could never afford to own GPUs (especially to have them sit around for 90% of the time). The "dumb" terminals let me rent them as I need them for projects.
Re:But I need good source control (Score:4, Insightful)
However it comes down to the question, on how far do you want to go on the cloud until you need to run stuff locally.
In my experience, just setting up my local computer's dev environment is often a major obstacle - get the right versions, the right tools, homebrew the right stuff, install the right SDKs. I'd enjoy a project to have some kind of curated dev setup where those things get delivered out of the box. It could be via a docker container I guess, though I'd still have to do work on my machine to be able to run it. It could be via something like npm which usually gets most of the dependencies, though I still have to download a bunch of tools. Having the setup provided centrally sounds really nice.
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If somebody else set up your repo for you, you'd have most of that now. If it is how they wanted it to work. Often that is not wanted, because then all the third party SDKs are stuck in your project, and now you have to manage their release cycle. They might be large, too. So the local setup of SDKs is intentional, and is seen as having benefits.
And if they didn't set it up for you, you still have to.
This looks mildly interesting, but the actual use case is not obvious.
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It doesn't work for all projects, but I don't install any tools on my host any more. Except one: docker. And, ideally, I already have make - because Makefiles make launching containers slightly nicer.
Folks that are new to the project:
make setup
which sets up some docker volumes and populates them appropriately.
Once that's done, there are things like
make server
make tests
make continuous_integration
Each launches the needed containers with all the right tools. Does all the right volume mappings so you can use
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Oh - and git. Or whatever source control you're using. You could do that in docker, too, but I'd rather not.
So really 2-3 tools, ideally - but those are super stable and have installers on the big platforms (where they're not already installed).
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Setting up a remote dev environment could be even worse. Even with cloud services you often have to get your tools up to the servers. Maybe it's fine for the herd that only compiles for Windows and always with the latest tools. But if you need a specific version of GCC for your 8051 based device, good luck finding this pre-built by Microsoft or Amazon.
Note even today, Azure DevOps will throttle users and put up a notification that they are doing so after only a few refreshes of a page. Putting stuff in the
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On Windows. There, it's a major hassle, enough to discourage you from development on that platform (my experience with C++ and VS).
On Linux it's a lot better. Installing libraries you need and then pulling them into your project using CMake is a doddle.
Of course, YMMV, depending on what language you use.
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As an employer, I could too. However, the "trusted" part of the equation seems to be sadly lacking.
if I am developing something, I am not sure my backers would be dead keen on me putting it on servers owned by a faceless entity in a remote part of the planet. And if that is what they want, hell, I'll put my own servers in a colo and they can pay for them instead - at least I know where they are, and probably the names of the guard do
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Cost seems to go up, although maybe people don't see it. Storing code on the net isn't free but some open source sites are relying upon donations. For commercial cloud though, they want someone to pay Maybe it's obnoxious ads where you pay with your soul. If you're at a company though there's going to be a bill due. And as more and more CPU use shows up in the cloud the more the cloud services will want to be paid for it. Compiling in the cloud seems very strange, it's the perfect thing to do on a loca
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Zzz (Score:2)
Lower those barriers (Score:2)
This is great news for the democratization of software development. Needing nothing more than a browser will enable a lot of people to contribute to projects who might not otherwise have the means.
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Don't forget stable cheap-or-free internet access. In demographics where an adequate dev machine is outside the means of people, connectivity often is too. Heck, there are some places in the US of frickin A where people struggle with that.
The gigs-and-gigs of updates some software run in the background, or websites use up for tracking purposes, press a finger hard on the problem.
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Using all this cloud stuff from home during a lockdown is really problematic. People's homes don't have the same fat pipe that's at the office. And most home internet services are asymmetrical - big pipe downloading to you, tiny pipe to send data the other way.
Re:Lower those barriers (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a long line of people asking, "Can I help? What needs to get done? How can I contribute?" and there not only isn't any work left undone that they're needed for, there isn't even enough volunteer project managers to explain to them all that they're not needed. There is nothing to be done except ignoring them, and rejecting their push requests.
That is the state of open source. Unless you already have some popular software you want to release as open source, the community needs nothing from you, and attempts at volunteering place you underfoot.
If you think you're going to contribute, the shortage is in projects that have a leader with an idea for something new and who is committed to seeing these ideas implemented. If you have that, then get the code started and release it. There is no need for any sort of casual newbs who don't have an IDE to somehow "contribute" something, as if code is art and it all runs the same. It doesn't all run the same, not all expressions are equal; the act of writing code is not inherently virtuous.
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No, they need to have a capacity for original ideas. Drones who need direction are a cost, and they require management, so, unless you're getting some benefit out of Mechanical Turk style labor, you'd be better off ignoring them.
Those capable of independent direction don't need a FOSS priest to bless their work--they can give it away like anyone else.
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Wow, this is incredibly pessimistic. The project I work on has a whole slew of ways that beginners can help. We actually have a tag in our issue queue for tasks that are good for Novices. We also encourage other non-code contributions, like:
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We also encourage other non-code contributions, like:
Right, right, right, if they can come up with some new idea for something they would do, and are also going to do it, that might be helpful. But not unless they have a non-casual interest in the project. It is a lot of work for a beginner to write documentation teaching people how to use things they don't even understand yet themselves.
You say you create tags; so check the work that gets accepted and where it came from, and see if generalized begging for help was involved. And were those changes cosmetic, o
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13 year old me would have lost his mind at the programming tools available these days.
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"Back in the old days, we only had zeroes and ones."
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IBM tried to lease me some twos, but I told them to get lost.
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Very wise. IBM have the kind of twos where 2+5=5 ... at least when it comes to price.
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Linux is available with compilers and linkers. It supports VMs so one can do things like run a virtual mainframe and write COBOL and JCL. There are projects that allow coding in C# and
Then, for Windows, there is C
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Hey thanks for stating your arguments in an asshole-free way!
Duh, yes, those things are available. But no, not everyone who has a browser has access to them. See phones, tablets, Chromebooks, library/school computers etc.
"Democracy" is from the greek "rule by the people", as in not being gatekept by the haves. Think outside the dictionary, man!
And how to I get Emacs in there? (Score:2)
They do not really think people will switch editors, do they?
Re:And how to I get Emacs in there? (Score:4, Funny)
They do not really think people will switch editors, do they?
The entire GitHub Codespace runs in Emacs, so you're all set.
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It's a totally retro editor, but it'd be way better if you ported it to run in a browser, because then you could press Command-Alt-Meta-Shift-Brightness up-Option-Capslock-D to open up a new source code file on Google Docs directly from your Amazon iCloud.
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And how to I get Emacs in there?
M-x replace-regexp <RET> to <RET> do <RET>
PS you should really use vi :-)
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Naaa, vi is for sysadmins....
backspace backspace (Score:3)
I am the target audience for this, but I will never use it.
That's because this means they will be privy to every character I type - including the ones I don't want them to see for privacy or security reasons. Once wrong copy-paste and in theory a password or user data could be in a log somewhere on the Github servers.
Or course this is also true for any other online tools that use services like HotJar, FullStory or the slew of other "A/B" testing tools. Example:
https://youtu.be/-X8gokl5PWY [youtu.be]
Using the web increasingly feels like having unprotected sex - a still lot of fun but very risky.
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Doesn't sound infeasible to me. If GitHub has 10 million active users who each type in 10,000 keystrokes per day (which I bet is a big overestimate), that's only 100GB per day of raw data. If that were compressed, a single hard drive could probably store an entire year's worth of all of GitHub's users' keyboard logs. (Although I doubt that they're bothering to actually do that.)
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The problem is not in tracking everything. But that there may be background scanners running occasionally to be sure none of the code is plagiarizing from the cloud services company. Or someone uses GitHub for some private info or private company code, then GitHub is hacked and it's all visible to the world.
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Using the cloud in a way is an abdication of responsibility. Ie, do we have adequate security and protection over our customer's data? Who cares, let Amazon or Microsoft deal with it so that we can save 1% of our operating expenses!
Let's play thin clients again (Score:1)
Thanks but no thanks (Score:2)
- Security : ex: log everything you type somewhere "in the cloud" ...
- Stability : check status.gihub.com lately... it's like a Christmas Tree!
- Network : mandatory
- Performance : latency, `WebApp" is f*** slow compare to a local application.
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Using it for "quick edit", ok it can be good. Using it as primary IDE? Never
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The logging is out of control.
We're logging the act of logging. Somewhere, someone saw a rabbit, one time.
Also, I approve of the idea that we should test in production because we've developed systems so complex we can't reason about them, so we'll pick some fraction of our users to suffer the bug lottery at random.
Doing the editor's work (Score:4, Informative)
Here is the link to the github page abut that feature:
https://github.com/features/co... [github.com]
Now it wouldn't be Slashdot if we did not need to do the editor's job...
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Now it wouldn't be Slashdot if we did not need to do the editor's job...
But is the editor now in the browser?
Web Browser is NOT an app container!! (Score:1)
Stop this non-sense please!
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It definitely is. Because that's what's hot and sexy. If you build a product, you have to keep selling it. If you own a platform, you can seek rent.
So companies want control or want cheap labor. Platform, on top of platform, on top of platform, ....
I mean, why was the leftpad debacle even a thing, when that's a core language function? What exactly was gained by making the replacement version a lookup table of literal strings of '0' of different lengths?
This is clean code? What the fuck are you people smokin
No. (Score:2)
Big tech is too easily convincing everyone to dependent on the cloud.
Nonsense like this doesn't lower barriers to entry, it tunnels under/through them.
My IDE is my desktop (Score:3)
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It's the inner platform. All of that will be reimplemented in the cloud for you, then they'll add a layer to simplify it, then they'll build a platform over that to leverage the underlying synergies, and next year, they're planning the launch of AWS Managed Leveraged Synergies Platform Service Wrapper Description Language to enable business logic to be described directly in marketspeak.
Slow (Score:2)
As soon as you click on the code button, the website sets up the environment in seconds.
So it takes "seconds" (how many?) to load? That sounds sluggish.
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Sounds like a re-release of Borland DB4, but with Emojis.
Jira Releases Zoom Plugin (Score:2)
Jira releases a zoom plugin providing a virtual boss who questions each team member about their open Jira tasks and updates each item based on response.
I'll leave the rest to the reader to fill in on their own time.
terminal / server (Score:2)
This is just a re-incarnation of a terminal - server setup,
wouldn't green-screen be nostalgic.
The pc gave me a computer I used and owned.
The internet gave me peer to peer.
Linux gave me root.
The cloud took it all away,
fuck that.
Just do it self-hosted if you really need it (Score:1)
Onshape (Score:2)
Simspons did it (Score:1)
GitLab had their Web IDE two years ago. And here we thought Microsoft was turning a new leaf with buying Github, but it's the same old story. Copying others and taking credit as if this is some sort of innovation.