glot.io 23 Apr 2016

I came across the quite awe­some glot.io last night - it’s a kind of paste­bin/​gist store, ex­cept snip­pets can be ex­e­cuted as code in a num­ber of lan­guages. I can see this be­ing a re­ally use­ful tool for show­ing or teach­ing pro­gram­ming.

There are some pretty great as­pects:

• It runs code server-side, so no need to in­stall tools lo­cally. This is use­ful for quickly demon­strat­ing con­cepts in other lan­guages. Code runs in­side docker con­tain­ers, for a lim­ited pe­riod of time and with­out net­work ac­cess, but that’s enough for most prac­ti­cal pur­poses.
• It has a good range of lan­guages. Some are quite un­sur­pris­ing; JavaScript, Java, Python, etc. However, there are some sur­prises (e.g. as­sem­bly and bash) and some lan­guages I’m keen to use more or learn, such as Go, Nim, Elixir, Erlang, Haskell and OCaml.
• It has an API
• It’s open source
• Snippets are em­bed­d­a­ble, re­main ex­e­cutable, and ed­itable! e.g. see be­low, and try run­ning and chang­ing it too:

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