Are there any websites that host arbitrary 3rd party command line programs?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35586152

by billforsternz • 3 years ago

3 4 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

In case the question is not clear; I would like to share simple command line programs across the Web. For example my Wordle solver https://github.com/billforsternz/wordle

Ideally the service(?) would let me submit a program written in C, C++, others(?), and present users with a mock terminal interface to run it. Bonus points if there is a way to submit input files or retrieve output files after the program runs.

verdverm• 3 years ago

GitHub Codespaces are pretty flexible

Maybe Replit too?

bruce511• 3 years ago

If it will run user-supplied binaries, then each user would need their own virtual machine.

At which point you may as well just fire up a small VM slap Apache on it (or whatever you prefer) and run your binary as a CGI program behind a page.

Or put another way, hosting a service like this would cost more than hosting a VM, which means an already tiny market just got smaller.

So, while I'm not aware of such a service, I predict it it exists it'll be more expensive than you are prepared to accept.

I get that using a Woordle solver is redundant, so this is an example,not an actual use case, but I'll say it anyway - if you want to share code like this then use JavaScript or set up a server and use PHP or whatever with your C code running on your server.

billforsternz• 3 years ago

It wouldn't be a user-supplied binary. The user would provide C++ (say) source code. The service would compile the source code once to wasm say. A subset of the standard library would be available. The service would spin up resources to run the wasm binary on demand from end-users.

I am not proposing to try and make such a thing myself, but I'm hoping someone has done it. It would be widely useful. Programming languages are a dime a dozen but sharing simple programs written with them is problematic when there is such a disconnect between the I/O model of most programming languages plus their standard libraries and the realities of web architecture and plumbing. But adapting one to another is something people do. Web REPLs are a thing, I just want a web REPL taken to the next level.

Surely it should be possible to do "Hello World" on the web.

cranglin• 3 years ago

Maybe you could try bundling it into WASM and interface with it via JS? No server needed

Are there any websites that host arbitrary 3rd party command line programs?

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