Eric Simons built StackBlitz's web container technology, a WebAssembly-based operating system that runs development environments in the browser. He walks through the technical vision and the challenges of making it work.
The web container was the bet that we made the company on. StackBlitz was like a browser-based deep technology play on can we make a web assembly based operating system that can like boot in a browser in 100 milliseconds, run full on development tool chain. That was really it. We'd gotten the idea for this and kind of the insight that this might be possible. Because back when my co-founder and I, we came out to the Valley in 2012 and we just had the good fortune of bumping into Dylan Field and Evan Wallace when they were building Figma in the early days. I don't think a lot of people know that Figma was also a browser-based deep technology play. Their first pitch for Figma, they didn't have a design tool. The pitch basically was, you know, browsers have this new capability called WebGL. And with these things, for the first time, like you could actually create a graphics rendering engine that you could then build a design tool on top of. But you're gonna have to write that rendering engine from scratch, 'cause nothing exists that can just compile into WebGL. And Back in 2016, 2017, Albert, my co-founder and I saw the same sort of story begin to play out, but for web development and like development environments. And we were like, oh, whoa, like it should be possible, theoretically, like to write an operating system that in WebAssembly that could run all the tool chains on top of it that you need to do web development. That would be huge because setting up developer environments, it's a pain for beginners. It took us like four or five years, something to build WebContainer. What we struggled with for years after that was just how to build a product around it.
