Instant Go · Applied Go

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2021-09-05 12:30:03

Surely you know the Go playground already. It’s been around since Go 1.0. The Go playground consists of a Web UI and a server component that runs the code entered in the UI and serves the output. It’s a classic Single-Page Application (SPA). The obvious drawback for anybody who wants to run a similar service is the cost (in terms of time, sweat, tears, and money) of setting up and running the backend.

There is a project named Klipse that provides browser-side REPLs (Read-Eval(uate)-Print Loops) for many languages since years. Each language needs a different approach though. A few days ago, on August 29th, the Klipse team announced support for Go.

This means nothing less that there is now a server-less Go playground available for online documentation, blogs, tutorials, and so forth, to provide code that the reader can immediately run – and edit.

And yes, this is literally server-less in the sense of “no backend required”, and not the kind of “serverless” that commonly is an euphemism for “the backend runs on servers that other people manage for me”.