[lastangryman]

Apologies, I'm not up to date in this space, so probably a stupid question but how does this differ to docker compose?

My understanding of the value of codespaces was instant start up, literally zero to download locally, and centralised definition. Does this mean I would go back to have to downloading everything locally, albeit in a nice sandboxed package with a neat definition language and convenient command?

[CGamesPlay]

Docker compose is a pretty poor development environment experience. Constantly having to rebuild containers to recompile dependencies; dealing with permissions differences for volume mounts; having to modify all the scripts to start with "docker compose run --rm"; having to deal with no shell history or dot files in the application containers... it leaves a lot to be desired.

[KronisLV]

> Constantly having to rebuild containers to recompile dependencies;

How often is this actually necessary? I've had projects that stick with the same dependencies for weeks/months and don't need anything new added outside of periodic version updates. There, most of the changes were the actual code, that was needed for shipping business functionality.

Furthermore, with layer caching, re-building isn't always a very big issue, though I'll admit that the slowness can definitely be problematic! Except for the fact that you don't have to pollute your local workstation with random packages/runtimes (that might conflict with packages for other projects, depending on the technologies you use and what is installed on a per project basis or globally), and the fact that you get mostly reproducible environments quite easily - both of those are great, at least when it works!

> ...dealing with permissions differences for volume mounts;

This is definitely a big mess, even worse if you need to run Windows on your workstation for whatever reason, as opposed to a Linux distro (though I guess WSL can help). I personally ran into bunches of issues when mounting files, that more or less shattered the illusion of containers solving the dev environment problem sufficiently: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/containers-...

But for what it's worth, at least they're trying and are okay for the most part otherwise.

[highmastdon]

Is it really like that? I expected a docker container having all the deps except for running the project which would be something that’s mounted as a volume. Then each container would spin up its own watcher to build/test/serve the project. And have a bash open to run additional commands.

Maybe my assumptions are wrong though…?

[GTP]

But this is still based on Docker, right? How does this address those pain points?