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Product Articles

Engineering articles about Product from the people building Replit.

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20241 entry
20239 entries
IK

By Ian Kirkpatrick

3m read
Cover artwork for the article “Landscape or Portrait? You Decide”.

Landscape or Portrait? You Decide

People have expected apps to rotate with their mobile devices since before the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. It’s especially important for productivity apps to adapt and let people choose how they want to utilize their screen space. With the newest version of the Replit Mobile App, you can now code in both landscape and portrait modes. This creates a significantly improved experience on smaller tablets like the iPad mini or larger phones like the Pixel Fold. Want to code on the go with your iPad mini? Simply rotate it to portrait, then later, when you’re home, connect it to your wireless mouse & keyboard and rotate it to landscape for maximal screen space. This is the first of many more improvements to the Replit Mobile App, unlocking your ability to build and launch your next startup from your phone.

MF

By Madison Fitch

5m read
Cover artwork for the article “Announcing Outbound Data Transfer Limits”.

Announcing Outbound Data Transfer Limits

Beginning April 7th, Replit will begin enforcing limits on the amount of outbound data that developers can transmit from their Repls to users and external services. Inbound data transfer is free.

202212 entries
EM

By Emilie Ma

4m read
Cover artwork for the article “Revamping the GitHub Import Flow”.

Revamping the GitHub Import Flow

Early last year, we made the announcement that our infrastructure and Repls now had Nix baked in. Just a few months ago, we announced all new Repls would be Nix-based. And today, we're happy to announce that our GitHub imports flow is now also powered by Nix!

SC

By Sergei Chestakov

9m read
Cover artwork for the article “Betting on CodeMirror”.

Betting on CodeMirror

At Replit, our mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. In order to achieve that ambitious goal, we need to make sure that the experience of writing, running, and sharing code is as seamless as possible. At the heart of that experience is the editor itself. As a result, we dedicate a huge amount of time and energy to improving the stability, performance, and accessibility of our editor.

LC

By Luis Héctor Chávez

2m read
Cover artwork for the article “Announcing File Persistence in Hosted Apps… for Everyone!”.

Announcing File Persistence in Hosted Apps… for Everyone!

Replit is your computer — for whatever you need to do. We announced last year that Hackers would be able to have their hosted apps be able to persist file changes since that made it possible to build a lot more apps. But we were not quite satisfied that only Hackers were going to get this new feature.

LC

By Luis Héctor Chávez

5m read
Cover artwork for the article “Making new Python repls 100x faster to start up”.

Making new Python repls 100x faster to start up

Python is currently the world's (and Replit's) most popular programming language. We've improved the Python experience during last year, with a Python package cache to make installs faster, and an integrated, multiplayer debugger to increase the understanding of what programs do. But there are still a few problems with Python. Packages are often very space-consuming, so they are installed into an ephemeral 2 GiB scratch disk to avoid filling up repl directories. Unfortunately this means that every time a Python repl starts, a lengthy package installation process must happen. This makes some Python repls take forever to start! Some other packages that have a large number of dependencies (like TensorFlow and Torch) were completely unusable because they don't even fit on the scratch directory.

20213 entries
MECBTA

By Moudy Elkammash, Connor Brewster, and Tyler Angert

3m read
Cover artwork for the article “Repl Space and Templates”.

Repl Space and Templates

When we want to support a new technology, we're faced with the question: "Do we (the Replit team) build this capability into the Replit directly, or can our users add it themselves?". Usually, we want the answer to be the latter. Repls are like personal computers for your projects. And the more these personal computers can be customized, the more they'll be used in creative, unexpected ways.

LC

By Luis Héctor Chávez

5m read
Cover artwork for the article “Announcing File Persistence in Hosted Apps for Hackers”.

Announcing File Persistence in Hosted Apps for Hackers

We mostly think of repls as being full computers in the cloud, and one of the goals of the platform team at Replit is to enable people to build almost anything in replspace. In the past, when a file was stored in a repl, it would only be saved when the editor was opened. This went against our goal and made it impossible to write certain servers that changed files at runtime. This was especially hard for newcomers, because that's the easiest way to persist information. Starting today, Hacker and Teams subscribers will be able to write services that accept file uploads or store data in a local database (think SQLite) or text file, regardless of how the repl was started.

DS

By Dan Stowell

4m read
Cover artwork for the article “Betting on Nix: donating $25K to the NixOS Foundation”.

Betting on Nix: donating $25K to the NixOS Foundation

As building software grows more like snapping Legos together, how people find and use those Legos becomes more important. That's why we are donating $25,000 to the NixOS Foundation and betting on Nix as the future of software distribution.