Cool, but I don’t have the emotional capacity to invest more time into another product that google will just shut down in a few months. I’ve been burned way too many times now.
It's very strange how lately new Google product launches always seem to be gated behind waitlists or slow incremental rollouts. Back in the Gmail days that happened for genuine reasons like very real machine capacity constraints, the explosive popularity of the product and so on. But these days Google has so much machine capacity they sell it to other people, and an experimental IDE isn't the sort of thing that's going to experience explosive consumer-scale growth. Presumably the waitlist is for product management reasons but it's an odd choice. Usually products get a spike of interest when first launched which then rapidly evaporates (see Threads, but also e.g. Chrome and Wave had the same issue), and so it's not a good idea to waste that first surge of interest.
Maybe at Google everything is an endless sea of complexity. It sure isn't for me, I generally can have a dev environment up & going in a few minutes locally.
The "full stack" Project IDX is suggesting certainly has an endless sea of complexity: Angular, Flutter, Firebase, and Google Cloud, all together in one "full stack application"? Yeah, that is a ton of Google-created complexity to smash together.
Google: We've made our tech stack so complex you need an AI to get started working with it.
I would love if this IDE had first class support for Bazel projects. IDE support is one of Bazel's weaknesses. I feel an IDE focused on polylingual monorepos and their build tooling (Bazel) would do well, as no single IDE works well for that use case. Seems like it would be possible to whip something up using the facilities provided by the language server protocol and Google's Bazel expertise.
This sounds like it could become a nice way to try out Flutter since you have to install Android Studio and/or XCode to get started on mobile development. Android emulators seem to require messing with bios settings for unclear reasons. It gets obscure pretty quickly. Flutter depends on a lot of baroque complexity that I guess mobile app developers just accept and it’s not entirely covered up.
Other development environments might not benefit so much:
For Go, the SDK is easy to install and VS Code works.
I’m out of date on Python and assumed package management would be kind of a pain to deal with, but I tried miniconda recently and it it’s pretty nice.
Web development environments continue to evolve, but there are some easy to use ones. I like Deno so far.
This looks like something google would do to get code samples to train its AI than anything the user would get in return. Also, it says experimental. Its Google's way of introducing someone as "Hello, meet my future ex-wife".
I'm not confident that gcp will survive 5 years at this point, so this thing? this is one of those google products that is practically born killed.
The google name has become an anathema at this point, at the very least they can try and spin it off as an independent startup or something to try and give it a chance.
If the Android and iOS simulators are lightweight compared with their native counterparts I'm all in. Android Studio's adb stopped working for me recently and the Android Studio emulator is just too heavy for my 2013 Macbook Pro which works just fine for everything else, eg. JS, Python, Clojure and Golang.
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As the CEO and cofounder of Coherence (withcoherence.com) - it's cool to see this project launch. At Coherence, we've been working fully in the cloud for the last 2 years - and it's better than I thought it would be. But it's hard to get more conservative teams to jump into a new workflow. While we've done a lot to support integration with local tools and development, I'm looking forward to seeing more innovation, and am curious to see Google invest here more directly. For us, all of this innovation is about delivering the best developer experience for end users that we can, let's see what direct IDX goes as well.
Other products to check out: codesphere, stackblitz, Replit
It's deeply haunting to think of a future where new/inexperienced developers not only think this is normal, but a good idea.
This is a guaranteed path to making it so that shipping code or building a business is dependent on one of a few mega corps (who will happily shut you down, rip off your ideas, etc, at a moments notice).
Skepticism of Google's commitment to anything is warranted although it's also worth keeping in mind that they do have some long lived developer oriented projects as well (Android & Android Studio, Angular, Dart, Go, V8 etc).
The inclusion of Flutter support here makes me slightly more willing to invest in learning it.
> paired with the universal access that comes with being hosted in the cloud, in a datacenter near you.
How is a locked down vm, that I don’t control, “near me” more convenient than the fast, portable computer in front of me that I can build apps anywhere on, even when not networked?
You don’t need a fast computer near you? Plenty of people like this model of development.
I personally love being able to compile massive projects while sitting in front of a MacBook Air or iPad. It sips battery while churning away at a data center elsewhere.
> You don’t need a fast computer near you? Plenty of people like this model of development.
Not really, honestly, and I've tried it in the past. Maybe it's a lifestyle thing, I travel around a fair bit on the train and value being able to do everything from my laptop. With an M2 MacBook Pro I can also churn through big Swift/Rust/JS projects and with a local LLM installed and some offline docs it's pretty productive.
Seems very limited for an IDE. Only certain web frameworks permitted for now, python and go support is still not there, and Flutter is the only choice for cross-platform apps. Android and iOS simulators aren't built in yet either.
Given the blog title and the blog itself, I was expecting a bit more and something less piecemeal rather than what is actually presented here which is an online IDE mixed with google AI.
Alternatively, they make IDEs and so does everyone else. They even have a web IDE powered by VSCode as an offering in GCP, like GitHub codespace.
This seems tailored to being good at doing front end stuff (multiple emulators, multi-browser previews, etc). Which is probably a problem google deals with themselves.
GCP's on-boarding process, especially setting up local entertainment, used to be a little complex¹. Maybe having the whole IDE in the cloud would simplify it. It would be cool to have ”Bard” create a role based on my code or refresh an expired token.
1. A bunch of really smart folks asked me for help with it on a few different projects. I tried GCP's VSCode extension but it wasn't particularly easy to use.
It would be nice if we didn't need this. It would be nice if we had a native(!) low-level GTK-like API on MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Windows has it but that's because Windows is ancient and backward compatibility is important, and no one has figured out how to ruin it without breaking backward compatibility yet.
> While Google’s been working on making multiplatform app development easier for years – from Angular and Flutter to Google Cloud and Firebase
Yea, and those products are not doing well. It would be nice to see Google focusing on the ship that's already sinking rather than trying to play with a siny new toy.
This is Google at its 1990s COMDEX/Microsoft Vapourware worst. There is no product to try, no code samples, no documentation. Just an animated GIF of what the experience may be like and a signup link.
This announcement feels like a "well, we're not close to shipping and we don't know if we have the resources to continue, so let's issue a press release and see if we can muster some interest to gauge if we should keep funding this". Or else it's just an announcement to help show that Google is invested in AI.
It is weird they would announce it without any real screenshots or demos. This is usable by Googlers. So it does exist, but I'll leave it to the team to hopefully actually demo it at some point.
EDIT: to add, the blog post does mention this: it is built on-top of VSCode, so it's a UI people are used to.
This has "promo packet driven development" written all over it. Zero chance something as random as this is going to get continued support from the company.
So yeah, regard it as an interesting plaything; certainly not something that you should get too emotionally or intellectually invested in. Especially given Google's penchant for killing cool things.
It sounds like whatever project you build will be in a GitHub repo, so maybe you could enjoy trying it out while it lasts and switch to some other development environment if needed?
You should not do anything serious on Google-based technology, especially not on non-core technology, as it cannot be depended on to be properly supported or even exist at all.
Similarly, it's safe to assume that any and all data that can be collected will be sent to the mother-ship for whichever purpose they see fit. I increasingly believe that the very similar act of hosting your proprietary code on Github is plain dumb. We're lazy and naive, actively creating these monopolies by giving away our value, data and secrets for free.
Convenience and (initially) free is how we keep falling for this.
Google is both harmful and childish. They don't do responsibility. They toy around like little children and cannot even grasp the concept of a customer. They can suck and screw up anything they touch for decades in a row with seemingly zero consequences. Because somehow 30 billion gets printed every quarter regardless of what they do. That would be 30 billion earned over the backs of the content WE produce, not Google.
In fairness, their office is an excellent adult daycare center.
Eloquently put, but I guess all those people seriously using Android, Angular, Chrome, or TensorFlow might disagree. Unless you consider these core technology of course, in case one may wonder by what reasoning IDX could not become core technology as well.
Indeed, Android app development is why I added the non-core part. Try as I might, I can't deny that it's a vast (business) ecosystem. Too big too fail and part of the money printer.
I wouldn't call IDX core because it doesn't solve the problem the article opens with. It says that modern app stacks are complex. IDX doesn't solve that at all. There's the same amount of moving parts behind the curtain, it's just that stitching them together is made easier.
The motivation for the service is unclear, but in itself it can't produce serious revenue so I guess it's an on-ramp to Google Cloud hosting. And perhaps another "free" service to train AI on.
It took me some time to understand your cynicism. I personally find it easier to believe that there is a spark of joy in the minds of those working on this, and that they are not only in it for milking our code to train an AI overlord to accomplish, what exactly?
We can certainly agree that to "navigate an endless sea of complexity" in getting an app "from zero to production" is no fun. Firebase is in the business of making this easier, and IDX is probably, as you might imply, an on-ramp to use Firebase. I don't see what is wrong with that.
I also fail to see why IDX would be free. I guess it will run in the Google Cloud, and provide their developers with some hard earned income.
All in all I'm still positive in hoping that there will be a real solution for a real problem :)
My neutral stance is that this is a potentially marginally useful tool. There's nothing fundamentally new about it. Github has an online IDE, as does Amazon, as does everybody. In particular at Github it shouldn't be that difficult to connect it to deployment actions, after which you have the same thing, yet with more flexibility.
As said earlier, it doesn't reduce the complexity of the tech stack nor will it maintain itself. When you create a React/Vue app this way, your shit continues to constantly get out of date. And you'll need to continue to coordinate dev setups within a team.
The ignorance of many comments in this thread astound me.
Sure, setting up a development environment for your small pet project is easy. But as soon as you start working on software that has been maintained for a few years, dependencies start to grow. A typical old Java project depends on Gradle (or Maven, or even Ant), an outdated JDK, Eclipse, Protobuf tooling, XML tooling, custom tooling, you name it. Next, your project may require linting, formatting, and will be checked by some third party services. Recently, Docker and friends have joined the party, and a web based frontend requires TypeScript, a framework, Webpack, and many other libraries and tools.
Joining a team with such a project is not an easy task. In a typical 500,000 line code project, it may take a whole day or more to get the basic system up and running. All the dependencies may break in a myriad of ways, and can result in a lot of unnecessary problem hunting.
Sure, there are tools to automate setting up the build environment. But even those require maintenance, and setting things up for quick onboarding requires a lot of time, and if done wrong, will take even more time to get right later.
It would save a lot of money and effort if I could have a reproducible development environment, and I would not mind if that is in the cloud or not.
> A typical old Java project depends on Gradle (or Maven, or even Ant), an outdated JDK, Eclipse, Protobuf tooling, XML tooling, custom tooling, you name it. Next, your project may require linting, formatting, and will be checked by some third party services. Recently, Docker and friends have joined the party, and a web based frontend requires TypeScript, a framework, Webpack, and many other libraries and tools.
You say that as if it were a God-given truth that that is how things must be, or maybe even as if it were a good thing that that is how things are. Which could hardly be further from the truth. The solution isn't to cover all that shit up with yet another layer of cruft, but to get rid of most of this fricking cruft.
