First Tuesday of January, 2009. San Jose, CA. 2200 PST -- We're 13 hours into the launch of runroot. So far runroot has been well received and we couldn't be happier.

numbers
We had over 900 hits to the intro article and over 1100 unique visits to runroot itself. People launched over 450 instances throughout the day.

The top launched languages for the day are (in order from most used to least): python, erlang, ruby, bash, javascript, clojure, haskell, clisp, scheme, r, lua, ocaml, arc, scala (erlang is probably skewed high because it's the default option).

omg twitter
There are a handful of interesting, succinct, terse, neat, and enthusiastic twitter posts about runroot. Peachy keen. You can keep up with runroot on twitter too.

next steps
What's next? Some things were made obvious today: an internal chat interface is needed, the output textarea needs to be replaced by a colorize-able element, and in the same vein, output should be given a splash of color (we're thinking pastels). Those requested improvements along with more ambitious upgrades are now nicely situated into the runroot roadmap. Subscribe to this feed to be the first to know when changes launch.

going forward
The current live server will expire in a few days. After that, it'll be the responsibility of people out in the tubes to turn on a server when one is needed. The cheapest server is $1.67 for two hours -- hopefully generous people will keep the public servers active.

thanks
Thanks to everyone who provided constructive feedback and pounded on the instances throughout the day. It only gets better from here.


-Matt
@mattsta
@runroot

Introducing runroot: live programming languages in your browser.

We've all seen the code running services out there. They're handy for a quick code pass off, but not very satisfying on a responsiveness level. They run in sandboxes. You can't modify everything. This is 2010. If I want to rm -rf /usr, let me do it, dammit.

runroot provides an isolated unix instance use can use from your browser. You also get full ssh access and some port mappings too so you're not depressed about being NAT'ed.

You'll enjoy a generous helping of 10 GB to 20 GB transient disk space, a network connection, and a hodgepodge of languages, libraries, and utilities pre-installed. But, that's not all. If you pick up your phone in the next 20 minutes, we'll throw in unlimited collaborative sessions at no extra charge. Everybody you invite can see the same output and can interact in the same shared REPL. Everybody gets a REPL (You get a REPL, and you get a REPL)!

For the good of mankind (personkind?), we have public servers open to the world. If you don't want to be so open, we also have private servers to keep the hoi polloi out of your way. Public servers are 20% cheaper than private servers (again, for the good of personkind). Public servers terminate instances after 20 minutes no matter what. If you need a few dozen shells for students in a class, you'll want a private server so nobody is evicted unnecessarily.

Where does the server price come from? Three variable specs: memory size, duration, and public status. As you expect, prices go up with more memory and the longer you need the server to run.

You can limit memory per instance so nobody monopolizes the entire server or you can remove limits and let chaos rule the day (memory can be oversubscribed -- having ten instances each with a 7 GB limit on a 7 GB server works fine).

What are you waiting for? Go give it a try and let us know what you think. For updates, follow runroot on twitter or subscribe to the rss feed.

This is the first public release of runroot. There are a dozen additional features we could add, but we're starting simple. We can slowly expand over time to fill out the most needed features. Right now runroot works under Safari and the versions of Firefox we had sitting around. If it doesn't work somewhere, email us.


-Matt

runroot gives you full programming languages in your browser.

For updates, follow runroot on twitter or subscribe to our rss feed.