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Seeking new host for Try Arc
6 points by evanrmurphy 2419 days ago | 9 comments
Is anyone interested in becoming the new host and maintainer for http://tryarc.org/ ?

I'm focused on other projects these days and interested in passing it on.



5 points by akkartik 2419 days ago | link

Hi Evan! This thread reminds me that we had an email discussion back in 2014 about how tryarc is hosted, and whether we can provide separate sites for Arc 3.1 and Anarki. You even gave me access to the repo, but I never did anything with it :/

I'm looking at the repo now. I wonder if we could host it on Github pages. That would be the easiest and most future-proof approach. Lately I try to host new repos away from Github, but for now it may be best to have all these related projects in the github.com/arclanguage Org. Improved discoverability.

As a first step: how do you feel about making the repo public? ^_^

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4 points by evanrmurphy 2419 days ago | link

Yes, I recall our email thread and I saw your email on there today, which I'm copying here in case other people are interested:

> I'm curious: how do you run things on your Linode? For example, I can't find the top-level html page in the repo. It seems like the repo runs inside an iframe of the "REPL" tab? Could you provide some instructions and peripheral config files (Apache/Nginx, etc.) to help make it turn-key? I don't want to make it onerous, but I think just a couple of lines and copy-paste will go a long way.

So responding to your forum comment above and this, I would love for Try Arc to run purely client-side on a static site host like GitHub Pages. Unfortunately, as you mention here, it runs on a VPS (Linode) instead. The reason is that it's not all client-side - it actually communicates with an system arc3.1 hosted on the server.

As for making the repo public, I think that is the logical (almost) next step. The only thing preventing me from doing that right now is a security concern. Try Arc isn't the only project I have hosted on that VPS. Currently there's a measure of "security through obscurity" that helps protect the other stuff on that server. I think the next step is to move it to a server where it's the only thing running. Then as soon as that's done I'll make the repo public.

I'll respond about the iframe and other configuration a bit later.

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5 points by zck 2415 days ago | link

> So responding to your forum comment above and this, I would love for Try Arc to run purely client-side on a static site host like GitHub Pages. Unfortunately, as you mention here, it runs on a VPS (Linode) instead. The reason is that it's not all client-side - it actually communicates with an system arc3.1 hosted on the server.

I looked around a little bit for solutions. There's a project called Whalesong, but the most up-to-date fork only runs on Racket 6.2: https://github.com/soegaard/whalesong .

In trying to find the github link for Whalesong just now, I came across Racketscript, a Racket -> Javascript compiler: https://github.com/vishesh/racketscript . I'll see if I can make it work later, but it looks promising.

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6 points by zck 2419 days ago | link

What's involved? I'm not much of a system maintainer, but I think tryarc is a great tool.

Thanks for creating and maintaining it for as long as you have.

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3 points by shader 2380 days ago | link

Any updates on this?

I have a vps I'm not using for much, and wouldn't mind running tryarc on if we got it running inside a docker or rkt container for minimal isolation.

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2 points by shader 2380 days ago | link

I guess another advantage of the container model is that we could spin up a new instance for each client.

Really bad resource efficiency, but I don't expect to have many customers :P

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4 points by evanrmurphy 2419 days ago | link

clickable: http://tryarc.org/

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5 points by akkartik 2419 days ago | link

Is the REPL itself down at the moment?

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4 points by evanrmurphy 2419 days ago | link

Ah yes it was! It's up again now.

Strange, I had just restarted it early in the day. (And that's what I had to do just now.) It used to stay on for weeks or months on average before konking out. Perhaps it was a fluke today but we'll see if there's something that's repeatedly interfering with it being allowed to run.

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