Support for receiving query params from other apps

[orta]

Describe the feature

Hi, I'd like to add a "Send to AST Explorer" feature to the TypeScript playground

Which means doing something a bit like this PR which added support for receiving a gzipped string in the URL. E.g. something like?

https://astexplorer.net/?lang=JavaScript&parser=typescript#code/MYGwhgzhAEBiD29oEsC2AHEBTVWB2ALjAJIJIDeAUNNOgE7IBuYBW0AHgFzR4CuqAIyx1oAXmgBGANzVoweHggE6vYAXh0AFAEpo5aAF9ZAsFu3dG8ZABM9smjQIALOvADuPLB4CidV1oAiAFksZ3hbPHgCFAxsXEIsawA6AO0ZGiMjIA

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I realize that AST explorer is considerably more complex than TS AST viewer because of all the other languages and parsers you support. Thus an issue for discussion rather than a PR. What do you think?

[fkling]

I think this is a great idea and should absolutely do it!

The way astexplorer works atm though would make this a bit weird to implement. Coincidentally I'm currently working on changing exactly this aspect. In particular, if someone would follow a link like that, it would not overwrite their current code, but rather create a new "workspace" with the content provided in the URL.
I can't say yet when it will be ready, but in the meantime we can discuss what should go into the URL?

One concern I have though: I assume the playground supports the latest and different versions of TypeScript. astexplorer supports only a single version (whatever the last version is that someone updated to). Would that be a problem for you?
I hope to find a solution for the general problem, but I also have been thinking about how sites like yours could specify their own parser to use (which probably introduces security issues). We don't have to talk about this as part of this issue, but if this is something you find interesting, I'd happy to chat about it at some point.

[orta]

Ace!

I think losing the specific version number of the current TypeScript playground to AST Explorer is a totally reasonable trade-off. It does say in the top right which version you are on.

You could whitelist parser sources from NPM, which is what we do on the TypeScript playground. It can either come from an official copy of "monaco-editor" or come from "@typescript-deploys/monaco-editor" and if it's not found it assumes "@typescript-deploys/monaco-editor" which allows for PR deploys microsoft/TypeScript#34855 (comment)

[fkling]

Oh interesting. I will have to look into that, I like that idea a lot. Is typescript bundled into a single file or how do you load it from unpkg? That's something I've always wondered about...

[orta]

In this case we use unpkg - my goal is to have official "supported" versions get bundled with the TS website (as it's a static site, we can then self-host all the monaco-editor deps) then the unpredictable at deploy time builds can go through unpkg microsoft/TypeScript-Website#97

[andrewbranch]

This is admittedly pretty tangential to the real discussion here, but I noticed it since Orta linked to my PR as a random example 😄

astexplorer supports only a single version (whatever the last version is that someone updated to)

As an engineer on TypeScript, I use astexplorer a ton, and there have definitely been times when I’ve wished I could easily see how some super old version of TypeScript parsed some code. Having the ability to select or bring in a different version of TypeScript would be incredible.

Anyway, sorry to derail—I love this idea, even if it’s just with the latest version of TS. 👍

[fkling]

@andrewbranch sorry for the late reply and no worries. I have been thinking a lot about this, but haven't come up with a good solution yet. Maybe I'm just stuck... The comments by @G-Rath and myself in #461 (comment) describe what the difficulties are and what a solution could look like. Any input/feedback/thoughts are appreciated!