We are three friends from different cultural backgrounds—Jing Heng, A'qil, and Sri. Despite our differences, our love for computers and culture brought us together to create Draco at NUS Hackers' Hack and Roll 2025, an IDE for wenyan-lang, a traditional Chinese programming language. Fun fact: we figured, screw it, let's build it in wenyan too as much as possible. So lots of backend processes run on the very code you see on your IDE! We're really proud to say that Draco managed to clinch the grand Top 8 prize at Hack and Roll!
Most of the front-end elements run on basic HTML and CSS, while for the transpiling and running of code we used wenyan-lang. Adapting to the vertical writing style and handling syntax highlighting were key challenges, but our perseverance and teamwork helped us overcome them.
Implementing the unique writing direction and customizing the UI required significant effort as we could not find libraries or components which directly supported what we needed. We also struggled with syntax highlighting and eventually chose Prism.js for efficiency.
We gained a deeper understanding of UI design and programming in a new language which was foreign to us all - forcing us to go back to programming basics. Also, perseverance. Lots of perseverance.
Draco on Github!輸官出。制台出。