Replit

Reviewed July 24, 2019

Disclaimer: Replit is a sponsor of the Future of Coding.

Repl.it is an zero-setup, online IDE for over 30 programming languages. It began as a code playground and REPL, compiling languages to the browser via Emscripten, but is now a full development environment that runs each language on a Docker container. It is used for everything from deploying web servers, to building games, and training ML models. It's particularly popular in education and with teenage hackers in part due to its lively forum.

Product Feel

👍 Instant, online IDE. No install or customization necessary
👍 Feels like "real coding" for kids who think they are "too old for Scratch"
👍 Lively forum
👍👎 Runs 30+ languages, but doesn’t have amazing support for any
👎 Slow iteration cycle. No auto run. Server restart on any change

Basic Usage

The above video creates an Express app that counts the number of times the page was loaded since the server starts. It demonstrates:

creating a new Express app in one click online
editing the code in an online IDE
running the app, including installing the npm packages
viewing the web app output without leaving the same page

Detailed revision history

Replit records detailed revision history for every set of changes, allowing easy rollbacks.

Community

Replit Talk, the online community, is one of the biggest draws for teenage hackers. They collaborate, give and receive help, and compete in "gam jam" competitions.

Classroom

Popular with schools, the Replit classrooms features autograding via unit tests, tracking student progress, reusable assignments, and open-source classes.

Pricing

Paid accounts have private repls, and faster machines (4x CPU and 2GB RAM), and 10GB total storage.

Hacker: $7/month
Non profit or public school class: free
For-profit classroom: $1/student/month
Enterprise: custom pricing

Wishes

Customize the syntax linting suggestions
Autocomplete suggestions for methods or properties on objects
Evaluate part of a file
Run a single file
Open a second repl if one is running a process
Use REPL on web app projects
Better colors for the console
JSON exploration in the console

Past wishes that were granted:

Google docs style collaborative editing