The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE

Post by diffeomorphism » Tue, May 24, 2022, 9:05 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #72

diffeomorphism wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a stupid question, but doesn't the remote environment run basically the same software? Or at least the same software as a local container or VM would? If so, why would this break less often?

200 engineers means 200 subtly different laptop environments, each of which could break in slightly different ways. With a good remote environment solution, each engineer can click a link and get a pre-tested, standardized development environment. They can then break it in any way they like... but then they can click that link again to get a fresh, working environment again. Imagine if any time you broke yoir environ…

Post by shp0ngle » Tue, May 24, 2022, 9:13 AM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #91

shp0ngle wrote: post #33

Running VSCode remotely introduces many interesting challenges, mostly due to security. (You are letting your users run any arbitrary code on your infrastructure.) However, I guess GitLab already has this sorted out, because of their existing IDE, and they are experts in this area. Also the open source versions of VSCode don't have access to the official VSCode marketplace. (Both VSCodium and coder.com Code Server.)…

It's all dockerized and security hardened probably. I'm guessing this is not that much of an issue. At least not any more than the likes of AWS, Google cloud, etc. allowing third parties to run whatever on their infrastructure. Not to say that there aren't any challenges but they aren't new challenges. And of course Gitlab has long been running CI infrastructure which would have the exact same issues.

Post by alephnan » Tue, May 24, 2022, 9:36 AM UTC

m_eiman wrote: post #97

alephnan wrote: post #31

By the way, Monaco is 10MB+. That's quite impressive nowadays for something so feature filled, but you're staying for 10MB when doing quick edits. Monaco is a mature, powerful and pluggable, which makes it a good platform to build on top of. More cynically, it's a good bang-for-the-buck project if you are seeking a promotion. The alternative is building your own. Maybe that doesn't make good business sense. And that'…

> under 14KB ( a single TCP roundtrip ) That's not a single roundtrip in any TCP stream I've heard of... Still, a lot smaller than 10MB of course.

Post by emteycz » Tue, May 24, 2022, 10:08 AM UTC

shp0ngle wrote: post #113

jillesvangurp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all dockerized and security hardened probably. I'm guessing this is not that much of an issue. At least not any more than the likes of AWS, Google cloud, etc. allowing third parties to run whatever on their infrastructure. Not to say that there aren't any challenges but they aren't new challenges. And of course Gitlab has long been running CI infrastructure which would have the exact same issues.

Yeah I know, but I have some indirect experience with this (not at gitlab, of course) and it was hard to figure all out. In short, it's hard to tell if you are doing repeated C++ builds or mining cryptocurrency. But yeah it's not that different from CI.

Post by worble » Tue, May 24, 2022, 10:22 AM UTC

crabmusket wrote: post #47

It's interesting to me that GitLab is adopting a Microsoft product (VS Code) and Microsoft owns a significant competitor in GitHub. Nothing intelligent to say about that other than to wish I'd been a fly on the wall for the discussions about that. > Next, we asked ourselves the question: Do we want to continue to invest in implementing custom features for the Web IDE that ultimately deliver the same value as those al…