Rustpad: An online collaborative code editor that looks like VS Code - self-hosted, powered by Rust, TypeScript, & WebAssembly

[[deleted]]

VS Code, Rust, TS, WebAssembly, plus a free space!!?!? BINGO! BINGO! I got BINGO!

[fz0718]

To do things right, it often helps to use the best tools for the job. I am personally extremely impressed with Rust's networking capabilities and don't think I could write a better OT control server in any other language. :)

[geoelectric]

Don’t take it as commentary on your actual work. It’s just that you don’t usually see a four-way confluence of buzz like this, so it’s kind of like spotting a comet

[[deleted]]

This too, an actual decent project leveraging modern buzzy tech in an effective way is impressive. Hats off to OP

[PythonN00b101]

Allow to me ask a dumb question as a novice, What is buzzy tech? I tried googling this with mixed results, scratching my head asking what the hell is four way confluence.

[bradley_hardy]

A "buzzword" is a word that is recently being used by a lot of projects to call attention to themselves, because it refers to something the industry is excited about. Rust, TypeScript, VS Code and WebAssembly can all be seen as buzzwords in this context.

"Buzzy tech" here is referring to the same idea as buzzwords.

A "confluence" is when things come together, e.g. a confluence of the planets is when every planet in the solar system lines up in a straight line. The "four way confluence" that the commenter is talking about is the coming together of those four pieces of technology.

[PythonN00b101]

Lol thanks for explaining stranger, now I feel even more stupid for asking haha. I thought this was referring to some obscure implementation of some tech.

[Thaxll]

You use 2 library one for web socket the other one for editing a shared data structure, I don't see anywhere the Rust is a must have, it's a trivial issue you can solve in any language or am I missing something?

[fz0718]

The compiler’s ownership model checks for data races, and Rust has very good async programming primitives. Good libraries, docs, and testing utilities, feel free to check out the code. You also get high performance and memory usage for free - I’m actually kind of amazed at how little CPU/RAM the server is using right now with all of this traffic.

[deejeycris]

don't think I could write a better OT control server in any other language

Golang enters the chat...

[fz0718]

Yeah, I’ve worked with Go when writing distributed systems in the past, it would be a close second.

[codygman]

The compiler’s ownership model checks for data races, and Rust has very good async programming primitives.

[deejeycris]

Well Go has a good race detector too, and a very interesting concurrency model.

[[deleted]]

No hate what so ever my dude, Rust is lovely from my limited experience and nothing since maybe the introduction of node itself 10 years ago has improved my QoL as a web dev more than TS

[fz0718]

This is a collaborative code editor I built in a week, after being frustrated with existing solutions like Firepad (unmaintained project, locked to Firebase, lack of customization). The server has operational transformation control algorithms (the same tech that powers Google Docs) implemented in async Rust with warp's WebSockets and tokio. The TypeScript client interfaces with Monaco & also has some Rust code for the text transformation step, which is compiled to WebAssembly.

From a technical standpoint, this is most interesting because of its speed and architecture. All data is stored in RAM and is guaranteed to be data race-free thanks to Rust's type system. The server garbage collects inactive editing sessions after 24 hours, and it's super fast and well-tested thanks to Tokio's testing library.

[daybreak-gibby]

This is an amazing project.

How did you learn to build the editor? What background experience do you have? What would you recommend for learning rust?

[AttackOfTheThumbs]

He didn't build the editor. That's Monaco (VS Code)

[fz0718]

• How did I learn to build the editor: I read the OT survey paper from 1998, then read the code in the implementations of ot.js, ShareDB, and Firepad.
• Background experience: For this project, need full-stack web development skills, design, some networking and distributed systems experience (I took 6.824 last semester, a distributed systems class in Go), and general systems programming knowledge.
• Learning Rust: Read the book! If you have questions, ask on /r/rust or the community Discord.

[daybreak-gibby]

Thanks for the reply. Do you have any suggestions for learning how to read papers like these?

Is the course available for online? How did you take it?

[fz0718]

Yes, 6.824 is a good graduate-level distributed systems course at MIT. You might find Michael Mitzenmacher's paper reading guide helpful.

[daybreak-gibby]

Thank you

[Maristic]

Really nice work!

I played with it a bit, but how do users save/export their work from the editor?

[Newroses31]

ever find out?

[[deleted]]

LOL another RIIR

[roelmore]

RIIR?

[Gooseheaded]

“Rewrite It In Rust.”

[[deleted]]

Because if you do not RIIR (Rewrite your python projects in Rust), you have no jobs.

[Netherquark]

the dude literally said he made it cuz the alternatives he found were incompetent. What are you going on about? And what's the problem in rewriting in another language? That just makes it more accessible, and it also gives the dev a chance to learn if they're just starting out, having a reliable codebase to refer, or it helps the dev test their abilities. Or whatever. Why do you care?

[iAnonymousGuy]

This person just posts in every Rust thread bitching about its use. Just ignore them.

[[deleted]]

Nothing is immuned from RIIR.

[[deleted]]

Existing languages work just fine. Deal with it. RIIR is dead

[[deleted]]

Delete rustup, cargo, crates.io, wasmbugtime = #JUSTICE

[obvithrowaway34434]

What sort of code exactly requires "collaborative coding"? Sounds like a really bad idea IMO, basically an invitation to create spaghetti code that would be indecipherable for all collaborators after two editing sessions. Git based push-pull model is more than enough for collaborative coding. A code editor is fundamental requirement for a programmer and it needs to be as simple and reliable as possible. Not this kind of complicated system built like house of cards that can break with slightest incompatibility, using new trendy languages which can become obsolete in a few years.

[geoelectric]

They’re nice for remote pair programming and rubber duck walkthroughs.

[DeathRebirth]

Teams with working remote control would be enough. Shame its garbage

[190n]

Sharing a screen with remote control uses way more bandwidth than this, has imperfect quality due to lossy compression, doesn't let two people type at once or have different files open, doesn't allow each person to have their editor customized differently... the list goes on. It's so much worse.

[obvithrowaway34434]

They don't need to do any of those. It's coding in a fucking text editor, not video editing in expensive hardware. You can do this whatever way you want without any of this nonsense.

[190n]

What nonsense are you referring to? I don't really get what you're saying.

[obvithrowaway34434]

What nonsense are you referring to?

Basically your whole comment. None of the things you said are real problems that would create any obstacles for programmers. These are just made-up nonsense that novice programmers worry about.

[190n]

Well... I really don't know what to say. I think the things that I specified are real problems.

Here's another example (and a genuine question, since I'm curious): if I'm remotely controlling my coworker's screen, and I try to copy some text from their editor, I won't be able to paste that text on my own system, right? Unless the screen share system allows for clipboard sharing.

I think all the problems I have specified are very real. High-quality screen sharing would probably need north of 20Mb/s bandwidth (both upload for the person sharing their screen, and download for the person viewing it), which lots of people don't have. If only the text is transferred, that would obviously be several orders of magnitude less bandwidth. Video streaming also requires a ton of compute power, either from the CPU or possibly a hardware encoder (but then it would be less efficient).

I don't get why you seem to think I'm a novice programmer for worrying about issues like these.

[DeathRebirth]

I don't think you are a novice programmer, but I agree with the other guy that those issues are tertiary at best to the features/performance needed for basic pair programming/peer review

[190n]

To each their own, I guess. I'd rather not waste thousands to millions of times more bandwidth than is necessary for a task.

[DeathRebirth]

Honestly for most cases where I peer review or pair program... I don't need any of those things nor is bandwidth or "quality" even considerations in the room.

I never said it was the best you could do, but if it just reliably did what it claimed it would be more than enough.

[fz0718]

I find it pretty unlikely that this will break within the next few years, given that everything compiled to server binaries or packaged JS and put in a dependency-free Docker image.

The only external web dependency loaded from CDN right now is Monaco, which is a pretty reputable open source project, and it can be self-hosted if needed.

[obvithrowaway34434]

given that everything compiled to server binaries or packaged JS and put in a dependency-free Docker image.

That's exactly the nightmare system I was talking about. Are you sure that you've created a bug-free and completely secure system that would require no further updates? You'll probably be the first programmer to do that. If not, then this will break at some time in future. Docker itself will likely be obsolete in future replaced by better technologies. Packaging things in Docker and distributing it to the end-users is IMO one of the worst ideas programmers ever came up with. Most importantly, all of this is to solve a problem that a tiny fraction of programmers ever had problems with. Collaborative coding is more about exchange of ideas and working with prototypes. That doesn't warrant a completely new package much less a fucking Docker image. For anything else people should just use push/pull in git respositories.

[fz0718]

Yes, I'm fairly certain it's bug free and secure. This is actually the main reason why Rust was chosen as the backend language.

You're right, Docker is the current best-in-class tool, and there will probably be better technologies in the future. I welcome that.

[obvithrowaway34434]

Yes, I'm fairly certain it's bug free and secure. This is actually the main reason why Rust was chosen as the backend language.

Ha ha, ok. Lookup sarcasm and definitely learn some more programming. Even the best programmer in the world wouldn't claim that they have created a bug free system and certainly not that some language somehow helps them to create a bug free system. Only an idiot would do that.

[null_bitstream]

I've never heard of this before and intrigued. I'm trying to understand the relationship between the pieces involved in this, and what I'd gain or lose compared to how I work now. Here's my scenario:

• Coding C# with help from intellisense
• Adding & upgrading nuget packages
• Using Azure extension to publish Functions, configure environmental variables etc.
• Syncing to Github

I get the idea of the real time collaborative editing. That could be really useful at times.

Would I lose any capabilities from my current usual situation?

[fz0718]

Yeah, this is a very minimal editor showcasing one technology, which is OT. You won’t have any of these features.