Worldwide Repls, part 3: Firing Up The Engines
At Replit, we operate a cloud-based infrastructure that allows developers to collaborate and create within an all-in-one, integrated development environment. One of the most significant parts of this experience is the latency perceived by the developer when interacting with the workspace. While we can always add resources such as CPU, RAM, and storage on demand, when tackling latency we have to deal with some fundamental physical limits such as the speed of light. This means that you can only do so much for latency by throwing resources at it, and at some point, you just need to bring the server closer to the end user. Given that we want to provide a platform for the next billion software creators, that means that we need to have infrastructure distributed around the world.
While we run many of the workspace interactions, such as file editing and browsing, locally on the user's browser, many tasks still depend on communicating with your Repl running on our servers. Examples of such interactions are typing into the shell and getting Language Server Protocol results like catching errors and finding symbol definitions. Because these interactions require communication between the user's browser and the Repl, the only way to reduce latency is to bring the two closer together. In doing that, we also ensure that each bit of the development feedback loop remains quick and efficient, improving the experience for the user.
