| My teammate built the WordPress Playground https://playground.wordpress.net The motivation was initially to build interactive documentation where you could play with the code examples and see how they change things, but it's being used to demonstrate plugins on the WordPress directory, build staging sites, add no-risk places to experiment. Surprisingly has been taking over some of the native development tools because it provides a sandboxed and isolated environment that needs no other dependencies and leaves no junk on your computer once it's done. It's trivial to change the PHP version being run (making testing on different version of PHP easy) by adding `--php 5.6`, for example, which is something a bit gnarly to do otherwise unless running PHP inside Docker. Another surprise is that once loaded, it runs very fast, faster than native PHP and MySQL (the Playground can connect to MySQL but runs sqlite by default). I attribute this to having everything in memory and bypassing the filesystem. It's been the kind of project that only gets better the more it's used. It turns out that having a no-setup, no-trace, isolated, risk-free app playground is an incredible tool for more purposes than we first realize. Someone even put the Playground inside an iOS app and it runs smoother than the native WordPress app. As for a good solution? Just a lot of work I guess but WASM is critical to it. Any device or platform that supports JavaScript can run the sandbox/playground app: VSCode, `node` itself, a browser, a mobile device… |