go explorer

Go Explorer

This is the home of the Go Explorer.

New, intuitive, and fun online environment for learning, exploring, and experimenting with the Go programming language.

What is Go Explorer?

Go Explorer allows you to learn, explore and experiment with the Go Programming language without no setups and needing to install the actual compiler.

Features

Below is listed all the currently available features:

1. A clear and user-friendly UI with VS Code like experience including a syntax highlighting.
2. You can run, build or test your code with a chosen flags including a few environment variables.
3. You can be format goimports and statically analyze go vet your code.
4. Error highlighting is supported directly in the code in case your code fails to build or the static analyzer founds some error.
5. You can share your code with your friends by a link.
6. Tabs are available if you like to experiment different codes at the same time.
7. Basic statistics are provided after an execution: build time, binary size and execution time.
8. You can import your own code from your local computer.
9. Several code templates are available to you if you need something to start with, including: basic, testing, benchmarking, concurrency and generics.
10. The most recently edited code is always kept in the local store if in case you accidentally close your session or a browser crashes.
11. Currently available versions are: 1.16, 1.17 and 1.18-rc (generics!)

Architecture

Language: Typescript

The frontend is build using React and the backend server is build using NodeJS and Express .(perhaps in the future backend will be migrated to Go??)

Go source code is executed inside a Docker container to properly isolate the execution. Nginx is used as a load balancer and a reverse proxy for the application.

Resource Limits

Network

No network connection is completely disabled on a container. Therefore, access to the outside world is blocked.

CPU

The available CPU resources a container can use is limited.

Execution Time

The total compilation and execution time is limited by the container.

Development

Installing

cd go-explorer/frontend && npm install
cd go-explorer/backend && npm install

How to build the UI

cd go-explorer/frontend
npm run start:dev

This will start a development server allowing a hot reload.

Build and run the backend

cd go-explorer/backend
npm run start:dev

Build or download the containers

git pull golang:1.1(6/7/8-rc)

Configure environment variables

You can configure environment variables placing the .env file to the root of go-explorer/frontend and go-explorer/backend folders.

Backend

ENV	NEEDED	DEFAULT	REMARK
GOLANG_VERSIONS	NO	1.17	semicolon separated list of available versions
PORT	NO	5000

Frontend

ENV	NEEDED	DEFAULT	REMARK
GOLANG_VERSIONS	NO	1.17	semicolon separated list of available versions
PORT	NO	3000
API_BASE_URL	NO	http://localhost:5000/api
BASE_URL	NO	http://localhost:3000

Testing

Run backend tests:

npm run test

Run frontend e2e tests:

npm run test:e2e

Deployment

• Digital Ocean (Ubuntu)

Community

• Please share your ideas if the application is missing some feature or there's some issue.
• Suggestions are also welcome if out environment is lacking some Go package.

User Guide

Guide

Browser Support

The application should work on a relatively modern browser. It has been tested with Firefox (95), Chrome (96), and Edge (96).

License

MIT