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Show HN: Symbolica – Try our symbolic code executor in the browser

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Re: Show HN: Symbolica – Try our symbolic code executor in the browser

#11

Post by diskzero »

I doubt that any paying user will be interacting with your system through a browser, but the browser-based demo could do a better job with status. You do show some activity updates, but it would be nice to know where in the overall process the task is. I was just about to bail when my one line C program finished. It took about 90 seconds. Yeah, I am impatient.

Your Lisp implementation would be interesting to me, but I don't know what the market size for a Lisp focused product would be. I actually don't know if the market size for C is great either. We did a huge toolchain refactor at DreamWorks a decade ago and there was a lot of C code, so maybe it would be relevant.

Re: Show HN: Symbolica – Try our symbolic code executor in the browser

#12

Post by diskzero »

narush wrote: post #8

Does this work on FF? I tried to check out some samples and couldn't see anything. Works on chrome, but ran long enough that I bounced. Not sure I'm the target customer, though, so NBD there. Cool stuff, thanks for posting!

It took a minute and a half for me using FF on a one line C program.

Re: Show HN: Symbolica – Try our symbolic code executor in the browser

#13

Post by kelleyk »

There are three "example programs" available on your website, but none of them are very interesting.

I'd love to see better examples of subtle problems that your tool can detect: the kind of thing where an engineer says "oof, yes, that's obvious now that you've pointed it out" but wouldn't have noticed it right away on their own.

Re: Show HN: Symbolica – Try our symbolic code executor in the browser

#15

Post by Choc13 »

SebastianFish wrote: post #10

I think the problem this product is trying to solve, making it easier to implement rigorous testing, is an important one. When I talk to junior developers I compare enterprise software development to painting. When you paint a room, most of your time is actually spent taping out all of the edges and boundaries. The verb painting is a misnomer. Similarly, it isn't a fast or easy for devs to see all of the boundary con…

Yeah I think that's a great analogy, we noticed the same thing when we used to work together at our last jobs which is what motivated to start this venture.

On the implementation side, yes we're using Z3, you can have a poke around at the core symbolic executor at https://github.com/SymbolicaDev/Symbolica

In terms of managing the path explosion problem, we have a few techniques that we've prototyped locally. For instance we believe we can do quite a bit by canonicalising and caching past results. We've also made our executor amenable to parallelisation from the start. We hope to start using these techniques in our hosted version soon.

With your example, maybe I'm missing something here, but they look like they are functionally equivalent to me. When I just tried running some values by hand they even appear to overflow in the same way. What was the assertion that you were making and what was the result you were expecting?

Re: Show HN: Symbolica – Try our symbolic code executor in the browser

#16

Post by Choc13 »

kelleyk wrote: post #13

There are three "example programs" available on your website, but none of them are very interesting. I'd love to see better examples of subtle problems that your tool can detect: the kind of thing where an engineer says "oof, yes, that's obvious now that you've pointed it out" but wouldn't have noticed it right away on their own.

Yeah that's a good point, we'll work on some more realistic examples.

Re: Show HN: Symbolica – Try our symbolic code executor in the browser

#17

Post by Choc13 »

diskzero wrote: post #11

I doubt that any paying user will be interacting with your system through a browser, but the browser-based demo could do a better job with status. You do show some activity updates, but it would be nice to know where in the overall process the task is. I was just about to bail when my one line C program finished. It took about 90 seconds. Yeah, I am impatient. Your Lisp implementation would be interesting to me, but…

We do have some upcoming changes that will make the status clearer on the website and will be removing some constant time overhead that we're paying on each playground run. I agree that the playground is on the slow side at the moment whilst we're still in the early stages of developing this product.

On the Lisp point, it's not really been developed for commercial reasons, as like you say it's not got the largest market share, but we wanted to see if we could get it to work with languages other than C and Lisp seemed like a nice one to try.

Re: Show HN: Symbolica – Try our symbolic code executor in the browser

#18

Post by Choc13 »

narush wrote: post #8

Does this work on FF? I tried to check out some samples and couldn't see anything. Works on chrome, but ran long enough that I bounced. Not sure I'm the target customer, though, so NBD there. Cool stuff, thanks for posting!

Hmm, yeah sorry about the FireFox thing and thanks for reporting. I just checked it now and it seems like the code editor div isn't respecting the height 100% style so it's shrunk to being a few pxs heigh. I'll fix today.

Thanks for giving it another shot in Chrome.

Re: Show HN: Symbolica – Try our symbolic code executor in the browser

#19

Post by Choc13 »

Choc13 wrote: post #17
diskzero wrote: post #11

I doubt that any paying user will be interacting with your system through a browser, but the browser-based demo could do a better job with status. You do show some activity updates, but it would be nice to know where in the overall process the task is. I was just about to bail when my one line C program finished. It took about 90 seconds. Yeah, I am impatient. Your Lisp implementation would be interesting to me, but…

We do have some upcoming changes that will make the status clearer on the website and will be removing some constant time overhead that we're paying on each playground run. I agree that the playground is on the slow side at the moment whilst we're still in the early stages of developing this product. On the Lisp point, it's not really been developed for commercial reasons, as like you say it's not got the largest mar…

I should add that we believe it’s possible to support other langs too, especially if they compile down to LLVM IR, or have an interpreter/runtime that does. So we plan to eventually work on support for others too like C++, .NET, Java, JavaScript and Rust.

Re: Show HN: Symbolica – Try our symbolic code executor in the browser

#20

Post by www_harka_com »

Choc13 wrote: post #5
brudgers wrote: post #3

Link, https://www.symbolica.dev I tried the try for free button. The run took longer than my attention span. Since I'm not a potential customer, that's not a data point. On the other hand, adding some text to the code editor page quantifying in minutes and seconds how long running example code will take would be a low effort way to manage user expectations. Setting the context as a proof of concept is ok. It's honest…

I’m not quite sure what you meant by this statement “Javascript that runs on back-button mouse over is not where to put your efforts.” Was this something you observed on our site, or just a general point about prioritising the core product over fancy UI effects on the website? Would you mind clarifying?

I might be wrong, but I think he meant that JS runs, a new http request is made, when you hover over the logo. (Which is close to the back button, so it seems like JS is running, when you hover over the back button.)
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