ericmsimons

Bolt = StackBlitz, ie Bolt doesn't have it's own subscription plans - if you go to your stackblitz billing profile I linked above you can cancel and downgrade to the free plan!

To get the mvp out we had to cut scope somehow, mobile was one of them, and an easy one because this app is meant to be used on desktop :)

Will be adding responsive styling shortly to it!

Hi- Eric cofounder of StackBlitz/Bolt here, not sure what OP is talking about? You can cancel your subscription at any time over at https://stackblitz.com/settings/billing

Here's a screenshot I just took of my own billing page (see the "cancel subscription" link under the "Current Plan" section): https://imgur.com/a/6ZTWgEL

Technically speaking yes, but practically it turns out you often need multiple levers to actually get resolution when dealing with bad faith actors.

At some point I intend to write a blog post about what happened so other startups have a frame of reference on how to deal with this sort of thing. Truly wild stuff and can be very counterintuitive.

Good question, here's the link to it: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220417315A1/en?q=(stac...

It's somewhat specific to our use case as you'll see when you read through. A motivation for securing this was that we've had issues (one instance in particular) where we caught a direct competitor directly copy+pasting code from our compiled builds into their own competing product. Asking them nicely to stop didn't do anything, nor getting emails from our lawyers.

The main lever a startup has to solve this is to keep innovating and being the best product in the market, which is what we have done & continue to do. But having a patent is a useful lever for general deterrence from bad actors like this. (Also want to say thanks and give credit to Vinay Hiremath, cofounder of Loom, who went through similar in the early days of Loom and helped point us down the path of securing a patent)

stackblitz ceo here, just to clarify:

we haven’t ever pivoted from webcontainers, not sure what you’re talking about there. it’s been our main thing since forever :)

stackblitz itself is a product suite built on top of webcontainers. note that many issues in the repo you linked are not for webcontainers specifically, but instead mostly for stackblitz specific functionality.

we have about 3m devs/mo using us for free on stackblitz.com, so we do the best we can for free public issue triage but do prioritize our paying customers (we are a business after all :)

We originally thought the same but a few years back started seeing increasing demand outside of stackblitz itself.

Surprisingly a very large and growing number of use cases across interactive edu tools, AI code execution (https://webcontainers.io/ai), SaaS dev envs for end users to write code, amongst others

Thanks for this feedback- we’ll definitely make it easier to land on the webcontainer.new demo from the homepage. I think our main concern initially was that without docs context it might be too confusing what’s going on, but I think we could find ways to ease that in that experience itself

Hi HN! Cofounder of StackBlitz/WebContainers here, cool to wake up and see this on the front page unexpectedly :) Happy to answer any questions!

Btw one emergent use case we've seen growing rapidly has been code execution for AI agents. Would love thoughts/questions/feedback if you’re working on things in that space: https://webcontainers.io/ai

Hey HN- creator here! Thought this was a fun example of a quine and wanted to share. I also made a video & thread that explains how it works: https://twitter.com/ericsimons40/status/1759955628825710760

Happy to answer any q's!

This is what we do at StackBlitz (stackblitz.com). All hosted in the browser without the need for servers, including fullstack applications.

We have a generous free tier on stackblitz.com! Self-hosting does require a paid license though (we have to keep the lights on somehow :)

is it "ECMAScript API of new open source WASM-based POSIX-style browser OS"

This is closer to what the Bytecode Alliance is looking to do with WASI, which we're playing a small (but crucial) part in: https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/bytecode-alliance/

Does "WebContainer API" mean "proprietary web service for accessing npm and git over http"?

Kinda, we have plans to allow self hosting and more reg open source- more to come!

Eric (StackBlitz CEO) here- just wanted to confirm that we are indeed using VitePress! By far the best documentation site generator available right now from a DX, design, and flexibility perspective. Highly recommend.

Eric (StackBlitz CEO) here- you can actually self host StackBlitz! You’ll just need our Enterprise Edition (https://stackblitz.com/enterprise) which can be run on any cloud or on-prem. Happy to answer any questions you might have!

Eric (CEO of StackBlitz) here- your explanation is 100% correct regarding why & how servers need to be used to power parts of WebContainer environments (i.e. proxying npm, git, transforming binaries, amongst a handful of other things).

Some of these operations can be cacheable which is ideal for scalability, but even the ones that cannot tend to be far cheaper than running VMs which incur by the minute CPU costs.

Our intention is to be fully transparent on the how & why, so I’m happy to answer further questions on all this! I also think it’d be good for us to include something more detailed like your explanation in our docs so that other folks don’t feel similarly confused when reading them- curious if there’s particular points that jump out to you that I can share with our team to include!

Congrats to Rich & team- SvelteKit is an amazing experience to develop with. Excited to use 1.0 on some new projects!

WebContainers: https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/

Hi- cofounder of StackBlitz here.

In regards to my comment 4 years ago, this was in reference to our v1 technology toolchain (turbo npm client, etc) which is all available as open source over at https://github.com/stackblitz/core.

In regards to WebContainer, it's still very much in beta and undergoing many internal API changes as we iterate, but we absolutely intend to release an OSS API once we hit GA.

Our current docs/developer portal has some additional API/config information on StackBlitz, WebContainer, etc (albeit still WIP): https://developer.stackblitz.com/

TL;DR this only lets you edit files, not actually run commands since there’s no underlying container (unless you pay by the minute for Github Codespaces).

This is in contrast to WebContainers which launched a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223012) and enables VS Code to run entirely in-browser (including terminal commands) using a WebAssembly based operating system.

Source: worked on WebContainer and am CEO of StackBlitz

Copy+pasting my answer from existing comment:

It works in Firefox today (minor issues keeping it feature flagged for now) and Safari is close to shipping WASM Threads, so this will likely work on all major browsers by EOY.

This really means a lot. I'm glad our work & writing came across genuine.

Thank you! Our entire team has definitely averaged 3hrs of sleep every night the past week to make this launch happen :) Incredible how much work goes into launching something like this.

Great question :) We have some additional technical info in our core WG repo: https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core

We also did an hour long podcast a few months back that goes into pretty deep detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F9qH-ea5Qk

You can actually do this with WebContainers today :) Try it out here: https://stackblitz.com/fork/node

Full WASI support in WebContainer is landing in the next 1-2 months.

Great questions- we have some additional technical info in our core WG repo: https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core

We also did an hour long podcast a few months back that goes into pretty deep detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F9qH-ea5Qk

We'll be open sourcing core parts of WebContainer as we move towards GA. We have some additional technical info in our core WG repo: https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core

We also did an hour long podcast a few months back that goes into pretty deep detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F9qH-ea5Qk

Yes. One of our engineers has gotten sqlite to run natively in WebContainer. Will be releasing as OSS in the next few weeks!

Did you read the post? You might be pleasantly surprised :)

For now. It works in Firefox today (minor issues keeping it feature flagged for now) and Safari is close to shipping WASM Threads, so this will likely work on all major browsers by EOY.