Re: Compiler Explorer app idea

[Matt Godbolt]

Hi Chris! (and CCing the development mailing list)

Thanks so much for the nice words about the site. And yes; the mobile experience is dreadful - we have a number of issues tracking this, and it's a priority for us to improve the site for small screens and mobiles specifically for 2020.

An app is a great idea! One of our main contributors, Partouf has already sketched one out and has laid the groundwork for others, making some API changes in the web site to make it more usable. So it's absolutely feasible, and I encourage you to explore it! The backend is as amenable as we can get it to this kind of app: there is a REST API with some documentation, and so a simple app ought to be straightforward to put together. The biggest trick is taking the short URLs and turning them into sensible configurations of the app. There are REST endpoints for helping with this.

The highlighting engine is not something I think you could easily reuse: it's part of the Monaco code editor from Microsoft and is rather a large and entangled beast. You might be able to extract something useful from the configuration, but I'd guess it's more trouble than it's worth!

Good luck; and let us know if we can help. The email list is pretty low traffic: for interactive help I'd suggest pinging us on the Cpplang slack :)

Cheers, Matt :)

On Sun, Dec 8, 2019 at 2:03 PM Chris Gregory <greg...@rose-hulman.edu> wrote:

Matt,

I've been using Compiler Explorer for a few years to share code and compare compiler outputs.  It's been really great to facilitate conversations on Reddit about optimizations and refactorings.  I've even seen it used as tool for diagnosing compiler bugs. I'm taking an Android app development class at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and am brainstorming some app ideas.  I've tried using the Compiler Explorer website on mobile and found it to be very hard to use, mainly because nearly the user interface divides the limited screen real estate, making each component too small to be usable.   I would like to ask for your input on both the feasibility of the idea, that is how easily I could interface with the compilation server and the highlighting engine, and how useful you think it would be to the users of the Compiler Explorer website.

Thank you,

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Chris Gregory

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Matt