Enable software development from any device via https://gitpod.io

[ghuntley]

trafficstars

👋 Carbon from Gitpod. Congratulations on today's launch which caught my eye. I'm sending in this speculative pull-request that makes it easier for people to try out (and/or contribute to) carbon from their browser without having to install anything on their local computer.

You can try out and test this pull-request right now by clicking on this button btw 🚀

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ps. If you make your GitHub members public (and/or fill out this form) then I can reconfigure Gitpod to automatically upgrade your maintainers/co-contributors to our complementary opensource plan.

Lemme know if you have any questions or feedback.

[ghuntley]

Update the documentation with steps to use this for Carbon development.

✅

Similar documentation for using other, similar tools like GH code spaces. We shouldn't be prioritizing one way of getting started on Carbon over another IMO. =]

See previous notes about the existence of no alternatives with a free open-source tier. If someone else wishes to PR in instructions then absolutely 👍

It's a bit unfortunate that we have to carry so much inside the repository for it

I hear you, as the author of the novelty art project noyaml.com, I feel it too. Unfortunately there is no standardization of configuration surface between cloud development environments yet. Over at https://github.com/gitpod-io/template-gitpod-sxs-codespaces has some notes I've authored for whoever has access to GitHub codespaces (it's in closed beta rn) and wishes to do an interop story.

I would like to hear from community members that would benefit from this and find it makes them contributing to Carbon easier.

I can offer two anecdotes that may help...

but ultimately let's see what the community that forms around the project thinks! If there's feedback I need to take back and integrate into the project that's something I wanna hear too.

[matta]

but ultimately let's see what the community that forms around the project thinks!

FWIW I've noticed two different Docker files posted to Carbon's discussion groups, and there is a third one committed to the repo here: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/tree/trunk/.devcontainer, documented here: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/docs/project/contribution_tools.md#devcontainer

Oh, and before I saw them through Carbon dev I had no idea these containerized dev environments existed. I like the idea (I installed Homebrew on my linux box, but I can't say I'm comfortable with it). Makes sense for the project to embrace them, IMO.

[havogt]

I missed this PR, I would be interested in having this (but I am not actively contributing, just playing with Carbon). Currently I maintain a setup in my fork.

It's just nice that you can start with a dev environment with the latest updates without having to pull and re-compile, especially if you are not using it daily.