Are there any websites that host arbitrary 3rd party command line programs?

3 points by billforsternz ↗ HN
In case the question is not clear; I would like to share simple command line programs across the Web. For example my Wordle solver https://github.com/billforsternz/wordle

Ideally the service(?) would let me submit a program written in C, C++, others(?), and present users with a mock terminal interface to run it. Bonus points if there is a way to submit input files or retrieve output files after the program runs.

6 comments

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GitHub Codespaces are pretty flexible

Maybe Replit too?

If it will run user-supplied binaries, then each user would need their own virtual machine.

At which point you may as well just fire up a small VM slap Apache on it (or whatever you prefer) and run your binary as a CGI program behind a page.

Or put another way, hosting a service like this would cost more than hosting a VM, which means an already tiny market just got smaller.

So, while I'm not aware of such a service, I predict it it exists it'll be more expensive than you are prepared to accept.

I get that using a Woordle solver is redundant, so this is an example,not an actual use case, but I'll say it anyway - if you want to share code like this then use JavaScript or set up a server and use PHP or whatever with your C code running on your server.

It wouldn't be a user-supplied binary. The user would provide C++ (say) source code. The service would compile the source code once to wasm say. A subset of the standard library would be available. The service would spin up resources to run the wasm binary on demand from end-users.

I am not proposing to try and make such a thing myself, but I'm hoping someone has done it. It would be widely useful. Programming languages are a dime a dozen but sharing simple programs written with them is problematic when there is such a disconnect between the I/O model of most programming languages plus their standard libraries and the realities of web architecture and plumbing. But adapting one to another is something people do. Web REPLs are a thing, I just want a web REPL taken to the next level.

Surely it should be possible to do "Hello World" on the web.

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Maybe you could try bundling it into WASM and interface with it via JS? No server needed