WebContainers: Dev environments. In your web app

StackBlitz has always struck me as a solution in search of a problem.

Buyer beware: WebContainers is closed-source and there are hundreds of open issues from users. Most of them are ignored for weeks and months at a time as the company pivots from one thing to the next: https://github.com/stackblitz/webcontainer-core/issues

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

That demo is really impressive. It's click, scroll, click to get to it though. I'd make it a big button on the main page with marketing copy around it.

Bonus points for also buying https://webcontainer.io/ (no s) and pointing it at the right place.

Also, this is like the better funded, more productized cousin of https://webvm.io/

There ought to be an open source version of this. Wondering if it's "just" compiling the respective binaries needed by the tool chain (node, esbuild, who knows what else) to WebAssembly and providing proxied network access (for the registry). Alternatively, wondering if this could work with the various linux-on-a-webpage demos that were recently posted here.

so I'm looking at the demo at https://stackblitz.com/edit/stackblitz-webcontainer-api-star...

Alright, looks like a lot of work went into this. What's the unique use case here? Help me out. I don't really understand why people would want to write code like this.

WebContainers is pretty awesome, and at this point if I were a server runtime (especially Deno and Bun), I would try to maintain a first-party web platform version for exactly the type of linkable, ephemeral, no-install, sandboxed, local dev environments of your that WebContainers provides.

I do wish this were open source, and the mention of a patent scares me - I feel like lots of people have tried this over the years, are they running afoul of some patent not fully linked to from the WebContainers site? - but I understand the investment that StackBlitz has made and the need to make money.

What does webcontainers exactly mean? Browsers don't allow me to call arbitrary other urls since the called server needs to allow with cross domain request headers.

What happens if I close browser tab? does that make the webcontainer go poof? What about memory and CPU requirements?

The idea sounds like a great hack, but the whole point of cloud IDEs is that it uses someone else's resources. I could get a 64 CPU with a bunch of H100s to dev on, run some script in background, and shut it when I'm done.

I've always been very impressed with StackBlitz. What they've done not only here but Sandpack also. Absolutely next level.

And they do all this work then open source it instead of keeping it as a technical advantage.

Strongly recommend their blog.

Not affiliated just a fan.

Keyboard doesn't echo on Android Chrome, only after return is pressed.

Your application and development environment (editor + 'server') are in the same runtime.

This seems important for iterating JS/TS programs ala Smalltalk.

i don't seem to remember you being able to run these without a net connection. It not being open makes it a no go.

Good tech, but only good fit for StackBlitz.

Don't know who will need this product to run a node.js enviroment in browser.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they never stopped to think if they should.

Dev environments? In my web app?

It's more likely than you think!