Replit Blog
Jan 20, 2022Getting Started with Rust on Replit
If you’ve been debating which new programming language to learn, Rust is a strong option. According to a recent Stack Overflow developer survey, Rust is: The most loved programming language, according to almost eighty-seven percent of surveyed developers. One of the highest-paid languages, only behind Ruby, Perl, and a pack of ever-lucrative functional languages. The best way to learn Rust, of course, is to start coding. This is where Replit comes in. Replit is a collaborative in-browser integrated development environment (IDE) that supports over fifty programming languages with built-in tooling to write and organize code; manage dependencies; perform version control; and build, run, test, and visualize execution of applications. There are a few reasons to use Replit when learning Rust:
Jan 18, 2022Use Replit At Work With Teams Pro
For the past 6 months, we have been testing Teams Pro while in private beta. Today, we are excited to release it to the world. Teams Pro is Replit for work. If your company wants to have a collaborative repository for sharing and editing code, create a team now. Here's what some of our users are doing: Host slack bots, cron jobs, web scrapers, scripts, webpages, and more
- Dec 23, 2021
2021 Kajam Winners
Kajam Winners It was a dark room with mystique and seriousness that accompanied the feverous whispers. Seven people stood in the room, held down only by the weight of responsibility they carried with them. One by one they were handed a link to a website- what they would find they did not know. And one by one the links were opened. Colors and music filled the empty air. Excitement gleamed in each of their eyes, their fingers danced across the keyboard, their mouse moved sporadically as though if it stayed still for too long they would surely meet their doom. And yet after another moment, the link was closed, and the display subsided. Each individual scribbled something down, and the cycle repeated four hundred times. After days of deliberation, the people consulted each other and wrote one final list. The list was placed in a red envelope, stamped with a wax seal of the Replit logo. The doors to the darkroom opened, and the individuals left. Leaving the letter behind. Today we will enter that room and open the red envelope, to announce the winners of the 2021 Kajam Game Jam! What was Kajam? Starting October 18th, the Kajam game jam began. On October 25th, Kajam ended. During that time, people rushed to create a game relating to the theme "HUGE". People could interpret that however, they wanted- and we certainly had a lot of unique interpretations. Our seven judges voted on the submissions for each of the seven awards that we had. Most Creative, Best Story, Most Polished, Most Hilarious, Most Theme-fitting, Best Kaboom Game, and of course the grand prize Most Fun. All the categories were worth $1,000, except for the grand prize. The grand prize was worth a whopping $10,000 U.S. dollars.
Dec 8, 2021$80m to bring the next billion software creators online
Following our Series A announcement earlier this year, I'm thrilled to announce that we raised Series B financing from new and existing investors. This year alone we've doubled our user base to reach 10m+ users, tripled concurrent containers on our network, and grew traffic to sites and apps on the network by orders of magnitude. This is a major milestone for our team & community. Our mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. To advance towards this mission we will be investing in the following areas: Build the world's most ubiquitous programming environment. Inspire creativity and generate value for creators through community.
Dec 2, 2021Deploying Django to Replit
Django is a Python framework for building out full-fledged web applications. It’s loved by developers due to its battery-included philosophy and comes preloaded with features you can use to rapidly develop your web application. Authentication and authorization have been previously incorporated into Django, which means you can focus on writing your app because the basic web development functionality has already been done. Deploying Django can be taxing due to the production environment varying from the development environment on your local machine forcing you to use different operating systems and system configurations. Technology like Docker can simplify this process. However, Replit simplifies the process even more by handling environment configuration and dependencies, which means less configuration on your end. Replit also allows for real-time collaboration. You can access Replit on any platform that has an active internet connection, and you can edit your code and connect with other developers anytime and anywhere. In this tutorial, you’ll learn why you should use Replit and how to deploy your Django project to it.
- Dec 1, 2021
Replit Blocks Adult Content and Malware
At Replit, we have created a general purpose computing environment that anyone can use to run whatever programs they want, and access whatever services they want. You can run almost any type of software in a repl, including Mac OS, a Commodore 64 emulator, DOOM, or even a web browser. While this is powerful, it poses a few problems for us. There are some types of programs, like cryptocurrency miners and spam bots, that either use too many resources or damage the community as a whole, and as a result we can't allow them. This is especially important considering that a substantial portion of users on Replit are teenagers, many of whom use Replit at school or under parental supervision. We want to continue giving everyone computing superpowers, while still finding a way to protect our users from inappropriate content. That's why, starting this week, we are blocking all internet access to adult content and malware. That means if you run a web browser on Replit, you won't be able to access any objectionable or NSFW websites. How does it work? We did this by enabling the use of Cloudflare's family-friendly DNS resolver by default in all user repls. Visit their website for more information on this resolver and the type of content it blocks. Using Replit as a proxy to bypass school or parental filters violates our Terms of Service. We actively shut down repls that do this, with both automated tools and manual intervention.
Oct 27, 2021Replit Art Gallery: An introduction to Replit's Illustrator - Joe Baker
Who makes Replit art? Hi! Thats me! My name is Joe and I’m Replit’s illustrator. I have been making art/graphics/multi media for the last 10 years. I studied Visual Media and excelled in experimental artwork. I draw for fun almost daily and I can’t stop thinking about aesthetics and concepts. It started with colouring in books when I was a kid I went from there basically. I have a huge love for making and appreciating art. I’m specifically drawn to art that rocks you to your core! Anything with wild colours, strange or abstract concepts, stuff that makes you feel something. My major influences come from surrealist art, psychedelic comics from the 70’s, 90’s cartoons, pop art, large scale public installations (sculpture and murals) and any festival artwork! My work is a fusion of these influences and I’m so lucky that I now get to create art for Replit on a full time basis.
Oct 25, 2021Design Systems @ Replit: Better Tokens
Part 1 of a series about our evolving design system, RUI (Replit User Interface). Replit is growing fast, as an application and a team. New features are being added, new people are joining the platform, and new designers and engineers are building it all. Unfortunately, this means that different parts of the product start to look and behave differently, because no single designer or engineer can keep all the interface states in their head. With dozens of people working on Replit, what happens when you want to update your color or text scheme across the whole site? What if you want users to be familiar with how components work anywhere they see them? It doesn't happen by accident — it requires strong infrastructural basics that you can rely on. So, we spent a few months this year building a stronger foundation for our design system. This is how our system is structured now:
Oct 12, 2021Faster Nix Repl Startup
For the past few months we have been working on improving our Nix integration. Nix allows users to easily use over 80,000 Linux packages in a repl. Nix opens the door to many exciting tools and applications on the platform. Our goal is for every repl to be backed by Nix. Before we can do that, we need to ensure that the Nix experience is just as good, if not better, than our existing Polygott solution. If you've used a Nix repl, you may have noticed additional loading time when opening your repl. The console would show "Loading Nix environment..." and you'd have to wait for a few seconds. In some cases, you might have waited for tens of seconds. We care about making repls start up as fast as possible and this additional loading time wasn't acceptable. Through some additional caching, we have entirely removed this loading time on many Nix repls. Now, Nix repls will start up just as fast as Polygott-based repls. See below for a before and after demonstration. Before: After:
Oct 4, 2021Enter the Shadows with Dark Mode
Looking for how to change your Replit theme? Click here. It's spooky season, so we have a spooky feature for you: Dark Mode™ is now available for everyone on Replit! Just open your sidebar and click the moon to enter the shadow realm. Click the sun to switch back. Dark theme will work across the app — from the homepage,
Sep 27, 2021Replit + Codex - Beta Release
Update: To stay up to date on Replit and AI, check out our Ghostwriter Beta & AI mode announcement. In it we discuss how we infused state-of-the-art intelligence into nearly all IDE features as well as the future of AI on Replit. At Replit, one of our fundamental goals is to make programming easier. When we got a first glimpse at OpenAI's new Codex model, our instinct was to think of how it could help people understand programs better—especially beginners. We've tested ideas before that used OpenAI's more general model, GPT-3, to ask questions about code. Amjad wrote about some of these explorations on our blog last year.
Sep 10, 2021Data Loss: a sad tale with a happy ending
Earlier this year, we discovered that we were losing data for some of our users. This manifested as either repls being completely empty after reloading, or some of the changes to files not being present after reloading. Obviously losing data is the worst we can do, so we had to fix this immediately. This blog post narrates the adventure of how we discovered this, how we fixed it, and the lessons we learned during the way. The discovery Throughout the year, we had had some worries about some theoretical cases in which users could lose data. We have had a few complaints from people that their code wasn't correctly saved, and since we weren't sure what caused them, we just tried to fix bugs here and there one at a time in an unstructured fashion. Around mid-July, we got an alarmingly large number of reports of people about their code not saving correctly in a short amount of time, ironically just after deploying one such fix. This meant two things: our intuition about folks losing data was correct, but the way we were fixing it was not! This led to the immediate discovery that there were months- or years-old bugs that were silently losing or corrupting data, and some of them turned out to be load-bearing bugs that couldn't be fixed in isolation (since fixing them triggered other kinds of data loss). This made us start a much larger project to have better guarantees and incrementally fix things without regressions. Homer Simpson doing a dramatic impression of this whole situation
- Sep 8, 2021
New Kaboom Workspace
We made a better kaboom workspace on replit.
- Sep 1, 2021
Making Replit Faster for Everyone
Replit's mission is to make programming accessible and provide computer superpowers. To achieve that goal, repls need to be fast. To that end we've been working on a number of improvements in our infrastructure and code to unlock faster repls. We constantly analyze the speed of our clusters and identify areas of improvement. Here are a few examples. Editing Code Just Got Faster We split repls woken up by hosting (repl.co, custom domains) to different VMs than repls that you access in the workspace. This makes editing code and interacting with your repl in the workspace faster by ensuring your usage isn't competing with nearly as many other repls. For repls being actively edited in the workspace, we've seen an average 10-20% improvement in speed from this change. This applies across all subscription types including free users. More CPU For Your Repl
Aug 23, 2021Replit Joins Google for Education Integrated Solutions Initiative
New Replit features, powered by Google Cloud, make it easier than ever for students to code. Replit is announcing it has joined the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program, utilizing Google Cloud as part of its core infrastructure to create accessible coding opportunities for computer science educators and learners around the world. As a participant of the Google for Education Integrated Solutions Initiative, Replit offers customers the ability to collaborate on code from anywhere, on any device. Students and teachers can easily build on Replit from a Chromebook, download it from the Google Play Store to their device, and even integrate Replit Teams for Education into Google Classroom. With the new Google Classroom integration, teachers can bring collaborative coding into their classroom faster than before. They can quickly add every student in their Google Classroom to a Team, easily add Replit projects as Google Classroom assignments, and access time-saving features like autograding tools and an integrated gradebook. As one Replit teacher put it, “I can concentrate on giving more time to working with the children and helping them rather than on housekeeping stuff.” These tools allow educators to focus on the important things, and Replit has those values covered, too. First, Schools and parents can rest assured that their students’ privacy is protected. With the security of Google Cloud infrastructure and FERPA/COPPA compliance built into the product, students can participate freely within a Replit Team for Education. Additionally, Replit has an app in the Google Play Store and will be featured in the Chromebook App Hub, making it easy for students on any device to get started coding. A Replit Teams for Education user, Shane McReavey, shared that “not everyone has the funds to purchase a laptop, so to create that sense of equality, that everyone has an opportunity, that’s where Replit has been really beneficial.” Another member of our teacher community recently shared that “Coding online is the best option for students especially if there is another lockdown. Many of them only have Chromebooks at home.” When so many students are still learning from their computers and tablets at home and numerous schools have opted to distribute Chromebooks to their students, this makes an enormous difference.