FAQ

Why binary files (like images) are not supported?

Because GitHub gists can only store text files.

It's possible to design another IDE production to manage user account and files directly, similar to Codesandbox. But I have no plan to do that yet.

Regardless of the other future product, dumber-gist will be free forever. It's very cheap to host dumber-gist, thank DigitalOcean and CloudFlare.

Why Vue SFC (.vue file) is not supported?

Vue's SFC compiler runs in Nodejs environment, I have not figured out how to run it inside the browser.

Why Angular and Ember are not supported?

Their toolchains run in Nodejs environment, I have not figured out how to run them inside the browser.

Why Stylus is not supported?

Stylus uses tons of Nodejs fs APIs, it assumes Nodejs environment. It's hard for me to run it inside browser if Stylus didn't redesign the whole thing.

Why Dumber Gist feels even faster than a local dumber project?

Dumber Gist does not write the bundle file to disk, it instead creates a virtual file in the memory of a Service Worker in browser. The service worker not only avoided disk IO, but also avoided the latency between the browser and the backend dev server.

Furthermore, because Dumber Gist doesn't allow user to change dumber bundler config, it can do very aggressive caching. In contrast, when you run dumber in Nodejs, the bundler is much more conservative on caching, as you could change bundler config which alters the tracing result.

Why iframed Dumber Gist runs slower in Safari than other browsers?

Safari prevents cross-origin iframe from accessing indexedDB (where Dumber Gist saves local cache). When inside a Safari iframe, Dumber Gist runs purely from remote cache, those remote fetches slow down the bundling. This effect is more obvious on those frameworks (Aurelia, and Aurelia 2 dev) which is distributed as a group of packages/files (they are not an issue for a local project as SSD is fast).

Aurelia 2 will update distribution to one dist file per npm package before the production release.

You can turn on Safari menu Develop -> Disable Cross-Origin Restrictions to lift off the restriction. But it is not recommended to permanently disable this Safari protection.

Firefox shows Error: Service Worker is not supported in this browser

Service Worker is not available in Firefox private window. Try to run dumber-gist in a normal Firefox window.