That's correct: 2, 3, and 5 are currently available. This initial set was intended as a minimal (albeit limited) set that demonstrates the UI capabilities. More widgets/controls (including the ones you've mentioned) are definitely coming.

7 is something I've considered (along the lines of a redistributable "Scripton runtime" that packages up the scripts and bundles a portable Python distribution). However, that's currently much further down on the todo list.

However, I'm assuming you want to drill down further into these (and have them displayed as a table for instance)? While the current version doesn't have that, it's definitely planned.

There are a few different ways for the Python process to communicate (send data over for visualization, receive/transmit commands, etc) with the IDE. For instance, you could communicate over HTTP. Depending on the use case, that can have an appreciable performance overhead. Instead, Scripton uses a lower-level mechanism with a protocol optimized for sending binary payloads (eg: large numpy arrays, images, etc). This communication and processing is implemented in C++ as a native multithreaded node module. It effectively enables very low latency and high throughput visualizations.

For certain projects, forking/extending may be the right call. However, for the degree of customization required for Scripton, writing from scratch turned out to be the more viable path (vs attempting to workaround/rewrite yet another component in vscode). The trade off here, of course, is that you lose out on the familiarity and ecosystem that VSCode has built over nearly a decade. The hope is that Scripton remains sufficiently familiar (eg: Search / CMD+P / etc work similar to vscode) while being compelling enough in its own right.

While the initial focus is on visualization capabilities, the missing IDE features are actively under development. Beyond cross-platform support, which PyCharm features would you consider essential and would like to see the most?

Currently, it's not user extendable. While it does support some IPython features (eg: Python classes that implement IPython's rich outputs also work in Scripton), ipywidgets are currently not supported.

However, I would like to eventually have something like Jetbrains' "perpetual fallback license" where you can keep using up to a particular version after, say, a year of subscription.

The data table got deferred to focus on the visualization bits for the initial release, but it's definitely planned!

Your Python plotting code ends up looking like this: https://docs.scripton.dev/api/plot/orion/overview

That said, the IPC minimizes copies and is actually fairly efficient at handling large numerical arrays.

The initial prototype did use React, but the overhead in certain cases soon became an issue. It got replaced by a custom virtual dom implementation (coincidentally quite similar to Atom's Etch), but debugging complex updates remained an issue. Eventually, it ended up in a place quite similar to vscode: no frameworks and a handful of "core components" (eg: a virtualized list view)

Why another Python IDE? Scripton hopes to fill a gap in the Python development ecosystem by being an IDE that:

1. Focuses on easy, fast, and interactive visualizations (and exposes rich JS plotting libraries like Observable Plot and Plotly directly to Python) 2. Provides a tightly integrated REPL for rapid prototyping and exploration 3. Is script-centric (as opposed to, say, notebook-style)

A historical detour for why these 3 features: Not so long ago (ok, well, maybe over a decade ago...), the go-to environment for many researchers in scientific fields would have been something like MATLAB. Generating multiple simultaneous visualizations (potentially dynamic) directly from your scripts, rapidly prototyping in the REPL, all without giving up on writing regular scripts. Over time, many switched over to Python but there wasn't an equivalent environment offering similar capabilities. IPython/Jupyter notebooks eventually became the de facto replacement. And while notebooks are great for many things (indeed, it wasn't uncommon for folks to switch between MATLAB and Mathematica Notebooks), they do make certain trade-offs that prevent them from being a full substitute.

Inner workings:

- Implemented in C++ (IDE <-> Python IPC), Python, TypeScript (UI), WGSL (WebGPU-based visualizations)

- While the editor component is based off Monaco, the IDE is not a vscode fork and was written from scratch. Happy to chat about the trade-offs if anyone's interested

- Uses a custom Python debugger written from scratch (which enables features like visualizing intermediate outputs while paused in the debugger)

Scripton's under active development (currently only available for macOS but Linux and Windows support is planned). Would love for you to try it out and share your thoughts! Since this is HN, I’m also happy to chat about its internals.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43090214

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