This document is an attempt to capture thoughts on the future direction of Compiler Explorer.
CE‘s UI doesn’t work well with mobile clients. The editor doesn‘t support mobile clients, and the layout doesn’t lend itself well to small screens.
Ideas for improving mobile support include automatically folding up all the panes into a single tab upon detection of a mobile client. This would require a bunch of fixes in the underlying UI library as this doesn't properly work with mobile and tabs.
Perhaps a read-only simplified view would work better: the main reason one brings up the CE website is to look at tweeted links rather than author novel content. Note that there have been some tentative work on an app-based solution, but nothing has solidified yet.
The UI has a number of things that need improving, but one of the things we are looking at is how to handle the loss of data that happens if one has a work-in-progress CE window open and then clicks another CE link.
Most of the open tickets are to do with adding new compilers, or fixing issues with existing compilers. Continuing to add more compilers and make it easier for others to submit PRs to add new compilers is very important. A separate document explains how to add a compiler.
There's an inherent tension between the standalone, run-it-yourself version of CE and the scalable, AWS-backed CE instance. Care must be taken to keep the standalone version usable.
Above all, the priority is to keep the main CE site up, stable and dependable. That also means that URLs should live forever once they are created
CE will remain ad-free, open-source and non-commercial. There's no plans at all to add “freemium” content, despite the Patreon site where folks can help support the cost of running the servers.
With all this in mind, the tentative goals for 2019 are:
A clear goal for 2020 is to finally tackle small screen device support.