Eric (StackBlitz CEO) here- you can actually self host StackBlitz! You’ll just need our Enterprise Edition (https://stackblitz.com/enterprise) which can be run on any cloud or on-prem. Happy to answer any questions you might have!
Eric (CEO of StackBlitz) here- your explanation is 100% correct regarding why & how servers need to be used to power parts of WebContainer environments (i.e. proxying npm, git, transforming binaries, amongst a handful of other things).
Some of these operations can be cacheable which is ideal for scalability, but even the ones that cannot tend to be far cheaper than running VMs which incur by the minute CPU costs.
Our intention is to be fully transparent on the how & why, so I’m happy to answer further questions on all this! I also think it’d be good for us to include something more detailed like your explanation in our docs so that other folks don’t feel similarly confused when reading them- curious if there’s particular points that jump out to you that I can share with our team to include!
In regards to my comment 4 years ago, this was in reference to our v1 technology toolchain (turbo npm client, etc) which is all available as open source over at https://github.com/stackblitz/core.
In regards to WebContainer, it's still very much in beta and undergoing many internal API changes as we iterate, but we absolutely intend to release an OSS API once we hit GA.
Our current docs/developer portal has some additional API/config information on StackBlitz, WebContainer, etc (albeit still WIP): https://developer.stackblitz.com/
TL;DR this only lets you edit files, not actually run commands since there’s no underlying container (unless you pay by the minute for Github Codespaces).
This is in contrast to WebContainers which launched a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223012) and enables VS Code to run entirely in-browser (including terminal commands) using a WebAssembly based operating system.
Source: worked on WebContainer and am CEO of StackBlitz
It works in Firefox today (minor issues keeping it feature flagged for now) and Safari is close to shipping WASM Threads, so this will likely work on all major browsers by EOY.
Thank you! Our entire team has definitely averaged 3hrs of sleep every night the past week to make this launch happen :) Incredible how much work goes into launching something like this.
