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Comment by zachlatta | Hacker News Reader

Neat website! One quick thing - the Ruby 1.8.7 REPL on the homepage was a bit of a turn-off because that Ruby version was recently discontinued. I'm not sure if any newer versions of Ruby have been compiled down to Javascript yet though.

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"Note that we are not using Ruby 1.9.x due to its reliance on threads, which cannot be ported directly using Emscripten." - https://github.com/replit/emscripted-ruby

Hey, I made CoderPad. I'm looking at replacements for emscripted-ruby currently. Interesting candidates currently include doing it all server side, and using mruby compiled via emscripten. Unfortunately mruby's greatest current shortfall is lack of `require` support, which may or may not be a dealbreaker. What do you think?

mruby is a completely different beast from Ruby. Consider it a different language, not a different version.

What about using JRuby on the server-side?

I've thought about it. The daunting bits are the trickiness around how long the session should live. You'd like the repl's variables to persist between commands, etc, but at the same time letting an arbitrary code session live for a long time on your server is probably not the safest thing. If you have any resources on the topic, I would love to look at them.

Check out https://github.com/opal/opal

This is awesome. Thank you.

I think the emscripten threads problem will eventually get fixed. In the mean time, I don't think there's a huge problem with using 1.8.7, but you might be able to improve it using the backports gem [1].

[1] https://github.com/marcandre/backports

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