About
The "aki" in akicode is the Japanese word for autumn, 秋. In autumn, oak trees fill up with acorns. And inside an acorn there is often a tiny creature hiding: a bug. Code is the same. There is always a bug somewhere, and tracking it down and understanding it is the best part of learning to program. That is why our logo is an acorn.
akicode is made for people writing their very first program.
We noticed that what trips up beginners most often isn't the syntax, but everything that comes before you even start: installing software, setting up paths, changing settings, and every system does it differently. So what akicode wants to do is simple: take all that trouble away. Open a web address and you can write and run, with no sign-up and no install. It isn't a stripped-down toy, but a real programming environment, and the code you write here runs just the same anywhere else.
It began as just wanting to run a debugger in the browser, so you could watch your program execute one step at a time. But to run a debugger you need real processes; processes need virtual memory and page tables, a file system, Linux compatibility… following one "it still needs this" after another, we ended up writing a whole operating system from scratch, one that can run gcc, gdb, and other tools you'd normally have to install on your machine. All for a debugger, it turned into quite a detour.
Of course, it's still a long way from real Linux. It's our own reimplementation, after all, and in many places its behavior doesn't match the real thing: some system calls aren't done yet, some are done but differ in the details, and certain programs that run fine on a real machine hit strange snags here. These are bugs we haven't caught yet, and we're fixing them one by one. If you run into one, we'd love to hear about it.
That's akicode, a small tool that's still growing. We hope it helps you write your first line of code without a hitch.