Ask HN: How did they make an online compiler?

2 points by ironthron ↗ HN
How did they make the compiler for this site? http://www.compileonline.com/compile_java_online.php

3 comments

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I assume it's a standard Java compiler. The hard part is preventing security breaches when the program is run.

The list of languages they support is impressive: http://www.compileonline.com/

At a (semi-educated) guess, they've got a box (or several) running Javac 1.7.0_09 (like it says in the title) and a script that pushes stdin and stdout around and back to the web page with the results of the compilation.

Trickier ways of doing this include Emscripten [1]

1: http://www.rfk.id.au/blog/entry/pypy-js-first-steps/