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Comment by manaskarekar | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know what is the possibility/progress of having full fledged compilers and interpreters running on Chrome OS in the future? Or is that never going to be reality, because of the goals of ChromeOS?

It is a great OS, but very light on software development options.

I know there is always Crouton or a native linux install, but out of the box support would be awesome.

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There is NaCl Development Environment (1) with bash, make, git, gcc, python, ruby and lua working. It is still very much WIP and it does not work on ARM Chromebooks. But if Android play store apps will be available there will be much more choice probably.

(1) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nacl-development-e...

Edit: it seems that ARM Chromebooks are now partially supported. I will have to check on mine.

Developer mode. Chrome OS is Gentoo underneath. Most people just use Crouton because Ubuntu/Fedora/whatever are the go-to Linux distros.

Well, isn't Crouton also a more stable way to play with a Chrome OS system? If things go wrong, can't you just blow away the Crouton chroot and keep the stock Chrome OS install (with updates) intact?

That is the case. I personally love Crouton for development on a pretty old chromebook.

There are many browser-based IDE's where you edit code on a remote machine, but I don't think any are mainstream yet.

Personally I'd be fine with a nice editor and a terminal window. Suppose there were a way to get Atom to run in this mode?

Well, seeing as how these are designed for always on internet connections, I'm guessing people will simply remote into a box at home or work to do the compiling.

Wouldn't you just install Linux on it instead?

This is what I do on my chromebook pixel (2), but sadly the audio driver (really just the changes needed in the rt5677 codec) never got mainlined:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=573776

While you would expect linux to just run out of the box on these machines, sometimes even with it running some variant of a linux kernel from the OEM things aren't always so nice.

Me personally? No, I don't mind remoting into my server.

I'd love to see this, and my daily laptop is an Asus C300 Chromebook, but I think it's more likely we'll see dependence on cloud IDEs/environments rather than much native work. If they could get me a Ruby install and Android Studio on there I'd be a happy bunny.

This HP one looks really nice, and might solve a couple of gripes (last couple of ChromeOS updates have slowed it down a bit).

There are decent Android IDEs available if ChromeOS does get the Google Play store as recently rumored.

I'm really happy using Crouton on a Pixel 2 as my main dev machine.

More likely you'll SSH or RDP to a desktop/server environment somewhere, but there are developer options (crouton) if you need more in the box.

check out chromebrew https://skycocker.github.io/chromebrew/ It's a package manager for chrome os (requires dev mode). It's intel cpu only though; but it has a lot of the dev packages you need.

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