CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonweb-applicationsinterpreter
Amit Prakash
Amit Prakash

Reputation: 1221

Code interpreter in a web service

I'd like to build a website with a sandboxed interpreter (or compiler) either on the client side of on the server side that can take short blocks of code (python/java/c/c++ any common language would do) as input and execute it.

What I want to build is a place where given a programming question, the user can type in the solution and we can run it through some test cases, to either approve the solution or provide a test case where it breaks.

Looking for pointers to libraries, existing implementation or a general idea. Any help much appreciated.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1364

Answers (3)

borrible
borrible

Reputation: 17346

Take a look at the paper An Enticing Environment for Programming which discusses building just such an environment.

Upvotes: 1

Stephen Diehl
Stephen Diehl

Reputation: 8409

For Python you can compile PyPy in sandboxed mode which gives you a complete interpreter and full standard library but without the ability to execute arbitrary system calls. You can also limit the runtime and heap size of executed scripts.

Here's some code I wrote a while back to execute an arbitrary string containing a Python script in the pypy-sandbox binary and return the output. You can call this code from regular CPython.

Upvotes: 2

rmmh
rmmh

Reputation: 7095

There are many contest websites that do something like this-- TopCoder and Timus Online Judge are two examples. They don't have much information on the technology, however.

codepad.org is the closest to what you want to do. They run programs on heavily sandboxed and firewalled EC2 servers that are periodically wiped, to prevent exploits.

Codepad is at least partially based on geordi, an IRC bot designed to run arbitrary C++ programs. It uses Haskell and traps system calls to prevent harmful activity.

Of slightly less interest, one of Google App Engine's example projects is a Python shell. It relies on GAE's server-side sandboxing to prevent malicious activity.

In terms of interface, the simplest would be to do something like the Internation Informatics Olympiad. Have people write a function with a certain name in the target language, then invoke that from your testing framework. Have simple functions that will let them request information from the framework, if necessary.

Upvotes: 2

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