Crosscut

I mentioned yesterday, that Caterpillar is edited outside of the browser, on my native system. Changes to the running program will have to be sent into the browser, via a development server. This isn't the only way I could do it, and I'd like to talk about that today.

Long-term, I expect things to work differently. Instead of editing plain text files, I want to store source code in a structured code database (similar to Unison). Users would edit that code database directly, via custom tooling, including a custom editor. All of that could run in the browser, but the database could function as a distributed version control system, exchanging code with nodes running elsewhere.

That approach has too many benefits to ignore, but it's also going to take a lot of work to get there. And in the meantime, I want Caterpillar to function. Which means integrating with traditional tooling, like editors and version control systems. These run on traditional operating systems and expect code to be stored in plain text files. So that's how Caterpillar is going to work too, for the time being.