I'm Pk, the creator of Glyphide. Thanks for checking out my project.
I built Glyphide out of a simple, personal need: my partner needed help calculating complex international shipping costs. The courier had a bunch of rules but no online calculator. My first thought was, "I'll just write a quick JavaScript snippet for her."
The problem was finding the right place to host and run it. Every online editor I found required an account, was bloated with features I didn't need, or stored the code on a server, which felt like overkill. I just wanted a simple, powerful scratch pad that was easy to share.
So, I built my own.
I'll admit I underestimated the complexity of what seemed like a simple task, but that's what made it such a fun challenge.
Glyphide is a JavaScript editor that runs 100% in your browser. There's no backend, no database, and no user accounts. Your code is encoded directly into the URL for sharing.
*How it works:*
- It uses the QuickJS engine, compiled to WebAssembly (thanks to the amazing work from projects like sebastianwessel/quickjs and quickjs-emscripten).
- Everything is client-side. Your code runs locally in a sandboxed environment and is never sent to a server for execution.
- It works offline after the first load.
This approach has some interesting trade-offs. On the plus side, it's fast, private, and easy to host.
> On the downside, there's a practical limit to the size of the code you can share due to URL length restrictions in browsers, and there's no npm support (yet).
I built this for fun and for my own use, but I'm really curious to know if it could be useful to others.
Happy to answer any questions you might have about the tech, the design decisions, or anything else.
Hi HN,
I'm Pk, the creator of Glyphide. Thanks for checking out my project.
I built Glyphide out of a simple, personal need: my partner needed help calculating complex international shipping costs. The courier had a bunch of rules but no online calculator. My first thought was, "I'll just write a quick JavaScript snippet for her."
The problem was finding the right place to host and run it. Every online editor I found required an account, was bloated with features I didn't need, or stored the code on a server, which felt like overkill. I just wanted a simple, powerful scratch pad that was easy to share.
So, I built my own.
I'll admit I underestimated the complexity of what seemed like a simple task, but that's what made it such a fun challenge.
Glyphide is a JavaScript editor that runs 100% in your browser. There's no backend, no database, and no user accounts. Your code is encoded directly into the URL for sharing.
*How it works:*
- It uses the QuickJS engine, compiled to WebAssembly (thanks to the amazing work from projects like sebastianwessel/quickjs and quickjs-emscripten).
- Everything is client-side. Your code runs locally in a sandboxed environment and is never sent to a server for execution.
- It works offline after the first load.
This approach has some interesting trade-offs. On the plus side, it's fast, private, and easy to host.
> On the downside, there's a practical limit to the size of the code you can share due to URL length restrictions in browsers, and there's no npm support (yet).
I built this for fun and for my own use, but I'm really curious to know if it could be useful to others. Happy to answer any questions you might have about the tech, the design decisions, or anything else.
All feedback is welcome!
Live Demo: https://glyphide.com
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Pkcarreno/glyphide