The development team of the open source software CodeSandbox has made it their mission to make the sharing and collaboration of web applications easier and more accessible. After the development environment to be used in a browser was mostly used by developers to develop web applications with JavaScript, CodeSandbox now also supports Rust.
Decision due to Rust’s increasing popularity
The development team behind CodeSandbox reports that in 2022 alone, the developer community created more than 14 million sandboxes. According to the team, the simultaneously steadily increasing popularity of the programming language Rust in a blog post led to the decision to open their development environment to Rust.
Developers can start directly with the CodeSandbox and Rust in the browser.
They go on to say that in their own work at CodeSandbox, they wrote a large part of the architecture in Rust. They say the reason for this is that it gives the team more control over things like error handling. They also used Rust to rewrite some of the code. According to the developers, this has led to amazing improvements in performance.
The CodeSandBox team did not have their own software until the beginning of January 2023 Docker support extended. For the purpose of syntax validation, it then also had to implement the Language Server Protocol (LSP for short) and make some adjustments that the team believes can ensure a “pleasant developer experience”.
Faster, easier start possible directly in the browser
If you want to start with the CodeSandbox and Rust yourself, you can start directly from the Rust template by entering the entry in the header Fork chooses or directly the Rust Starter use. From there, a developer can then do whatever she wants to do locally: For example, open a terminal and add dependencies, write Rust code, or even her project in the iOS IDE by CodeSandbox or in VS Code to open. More detailed information about working with Docker is available in the blog entry and in the online documentation to find.
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